 |
Hi all, the post that follows is the first results from a bunch of experiments we are doing to help us build our ‘Australian small business website design guidelines’. We want to learn from our own experiments (and other places) what works.
I have to say the results were very encouraging. It also needs to be considered though that we only allowed 1 week before the changes and after the changes to compare the data. I have since been back in and looked at how the site is doing after 4 weeks in total and the figures aren’t quite as encouraging as below although they still represent a significant increase in every one of the items measured. In future we will try to give it 2 week either side of the changes for more comprehensive results.
I hope you enjoy the post and please feel free to comment. I am more than happy to share any other stats people are interested in. |
There are a number of assumptions web designers make about the optimum way to design homepages. Some of these are based on experience, some based on existing research from overseas. A lot are probably done for design reasons in some cases with no consideration for how it impacts on the site’s performance.
For this reason we have recently begun undertaking a series of research initiatives where we make some changes to one of our sites (in isolation) and we track the key measures of the site to see what impact it has.
The ultimate goal of the research we are doing is to develop a set of Australian small business website design guidelines based on our experience and our research onto “what works on the web”. Once complete, we will make this document available to the public free of charge.
The first in these research initiatives is testing the idea that the designer should take an active role in directing the visitors to where the business owner wants them to go and where they think the visitor wants to go. Rather than filling the homepage up with everything about a business or just a series of menus, we want to provide some obvious links to the common parts of the site so people don’t waste time trying to find what they are looking for and we are able to narrow down the people we really want to target.It’s called ‘funneling’ or using the homepage as a funnel as opposed to the common practice of cramming as much as possible into the homepage.
The results are very encouraging as you will see below.
The site and the changes
The site we have used for this first research experiment is this current site – http://awebsitedesigner.com.au.
Read More…
