good design should never make you stop

I recently visited the Canadian Ikea website and was utterly flabbergasted at what greeted me: a 15-second flash video that disables the search box and main navigation. I'll admit the concept is cool and the execution is excellent. But the user experience is just awful.

Imagine you're a busy shopper. You have a particular product need and you want to find the right solution as quickly as possible. So you go to the Ikea website... and for a full 15 seconds, the main navigation and search box are frozen. There's no way to turn the video off.

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it probes your site

New increasingly advanced tools get pushed into the marketplace each week from online marketing companies. Agencies and website owners are always on the lookout for the latest tool that will help them gain more insight into their website in hopes of gaining an advantage on the competition. While I use many of these products, there is one tool that I continually go back to on a regular basis which has been around for a long time. It's still one of the best...

The tool I'm talking about is Xenu Link Sleuth. I'm sure that most of you have heard of it, but if you haven't it basically it works in a similar manner to Googlebot. It will spider through the pages of your website, giving you a detailed list of information that can help you learn more about your website. There are tons of ways that this tool can be used including for the following issues:

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What do you do when the nation—nay, the world—is in economic turmoil? When businesses are going under, people are having a hard time finding jobs, and the economic climate is looking bad?

You expand of course!

Seeing as we're hiring new staff, we decided it was time to increase our digs and expand our floor space.

We bought the neighbors offices—initially a series of divided rooms.

Then we decided that we didn't like the carpets…

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Late roundup today because we've redone our office!

Not a whole lot of news this week since we've had our heads down with this move, but still some interesting and downright important ones, including long-tail research, how to use title tags for SEO, video game usability, and how your cookies may be automatically restoring themselves after you've deleted them.

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In a previous post, I mentioned we were working with a new client on a GWO test — and that this client was among the busiest websites in the world. I couldn't reveal the identity of our client then, but I can now. According to Alexa, the world's 3rd busiest website:

YouTube!

With over 1,000 combinations and millions of visitors per day, this was one of the largest GWO multivariate experiments ever implemented. If there was ever any question as to whether GWO was robust enough to handle large-scale experiments, those doubts have now been put to rest.

The goal of our first test was to increase account sign-ups from YouTube's home page. The results exceeded our expectations: the winning combination boosted account sign-ups by 15.7%

With a site this size, there are always lots of things to test. And we've already moved on to our next GWO project with YouTube. But of course, the details are secret for now. Stay tuned...

Please forgive the rant, but I've just about reached my limit.

Every day, I see an email or blog comment in which the writer has mixed up your and you're. Some writers even mix up to and too.

Seriously, I see "to bad" all the time. I usually assume it's just a typo. Then, I'll see the same writer make the same mistake again... and I can no longer avoid the astonishing conclusion that he actually doesn't know the difference! Weren't we taught the difference between to and too in about grade two?

If we want to make a positive impression, we should at least demonstrate an understanding of the rules taught in elementary school. So here are a few basic distinctions.

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great design, poor SEO

This week we continue our review of websites from Top 500 list of online retailers. It is very interesting to see how many of these giant ecommerce websites have poor organic search optimization. It looks like some of these companies focus on off-line sources of revenue (for example, retail store or catalog orders) and use the website as an extension of their "traditional" marketing—as a catalog or some other promotion piece—and not as an important outlet for sales.

Hanna Andersson Corp sells children's apparel. The company started this business in 1983 by promoting products through their catalog. The company's website—www.hannaandersson.com—generated about $65M in 2007 and while we don't have access to website's analytics, we can assume that some percentage of revenue is coming from paid search, bookmarks and typed-in traffic. Let's take a look at their Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to see what kind of traffic/revenue the company gets from organic search. Right off the bat, the website has some major problems in this area...

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once again we're set up and ready to go

In our last post on email subject line testing we set up two groups in ExactTarget to create two random samples of users. Today we're going to set up our email so as to send different subject lines to each group. The process is pretty basic, and should work with any email system, not just ExactTarget.

The first thing you're going to want is, well, an email. In our case we have our August Newsletter prepped and ready to go. Now we want to make a copy of that newsletter with a new subject line. In Exact Target this is pretty easy, simply click "create new email", and in here select "revise existing email".

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Little in the way of news up in Vancouver. The north-wests heatwave has passed (for now) and it seem's like we're well on our way into November. Everyone seems to be more excited than ever about the Olympics, and the disgusting levels of merchandization has started. Good time to be an internet marketer with a strong knowledge of ecommerce.

This week we have tips on how to keep your newsletter from hitting the junk box, new uses for keyword research, building charts from Google docs, the language of business, and Apples design process.

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In my previous post, I discussed integrating BoldChat and Google Analytics to get deeper insight into what 'chatters' do on your site.

We also have clients that use the LivePerson platform who were interested in seeing their chat data from LivePerson in Google Analytics.

Similar to BoldChat, LivePerson's default Google Analytics implementation causes a number of problems including (but not limited to):

• No cross-domain tracking
  • Visitor/visits are bloated
  • Referral information is lost
  • LivePerson visit information can't be tied back to the visit on the your site
• The LivePerson tracking code sets a UDV - this will not overwrite the _utmv cookie on the clients' site, but these UDV values will show up in your reports

Here are LivePersons PDF instructions for integrating GA

To implement the tracking correctly, you need to disable LivePerson's Google Analytics tracking completely and utilize the customizable chat window feature found in LivePerson. This feature allows you to customize the look and feel of the chat window. For example, we can customize the dimensions, the button images and the background/foreground colors. What we are really interested in is the custom branding. This allows us to control what appears on the right-hand side of the chat window by using iframes. What we want to do is set the source of the iframe to a page that resides on our site. This page will contain both an image (or flash or whatever you like) and the GA tracking code (GATC). When the iframe is loaded, the tracking code will read the visitors cookies from our domain, and then send that visit information to Google. This accomplishes both tracking of the chat window and associating that chat with the visitors current visit on our site.

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