What makes a great website design? Flashy animations? High resolution pictures? Classy colours?
Neither of these! A great website is a website that fulfill your goals. Whether you wish your visitors to buy from your site, subscribe to your newsletter, fill out a form…
Now how do you know if your design is working for you? Some people actually buy from your site, or send you emails from your site, comments on your articles. How do you know you have maximized the traffic? How do you know that half of your visitors are not leaving your site after a glance on your home page?
The first step would be to install a tracking device like Google Analytics or Awstats. That will allow you to see how much time people spend on each page, how many people bounced right off your site.
If your stats are average or alarming, no need to panic. You can come up with alternative designs and use Google Optimizer to see which one is the more efficient.
One of our client (that I will keep anonymous for privacy reasons) had a pretty high bounce rate, even though the home page looked really good. The keywords bringing him traffic were relevant but it wasn’t working as well as it could have.
We started a Google Website Optimizer experiment which consisted of created two alternative home pages that alternate randomly. We can track the statistics from these pages and compare the different layouts.
Here is what the experiment looked like:
Google Website Optimizer
This experiment concluded that both variations were a lot more efficient than the original design. In fact the Variation #1 has 99.2% chance of performing better than the original version.
We will now set it up as the default home page, and do a follow up experiment with the variation #2, just to be safe. I will post the results of that experiment as well.
If you think you design is not working for you. Don’t guess. Analyze!
