Launching a small website

The other day we had a new boiler installed in the house. The boiler man told me about this new website he had bought and asked me why he didn’t get enough visitors and conversions.

I had a look at his website and the first thing that struck me was this:
This guy had paid for the website, and still the company he got it from had put a link to their website from his website. I think this is analogues with having a haircut and the barber shaves his name in the back of your head!

When you approach a company to build a website for you, don’t let them advertise their product on your website. If they want to advertise on your website, get them to knock the price down.

I made a check list for him as an initial assessment of his website, and I thought I’d share this list with the rest of you.

When you launch your website there are a few things you can do to ramp up the traffic and get some more interest.

• Create a twitter account so your visitors can get news nuggets about your product
• Create a blog and add a link to it from your website
• Add your company to Google maps
• Create a content section on your website where you can write articles about subjects related to your product
• Remember to create “calls to action” (http://boagworld.com/design/10-techniques-for-an-effective-call-to-action)
• Create two sitemaps: An html version for your visitors, and an XML version to submit to search engines
• Submit your website to search engines
• Listen to our visitors by collecting feedback (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeoDYFUrsSw)
• Submit your website to various directories related to your product / business.

Get your visitors to feed back into your site!

Everybody loves feedback (at least everybody who cares about their users).
I was looking at GetSatisfaction today and saw that they charge quite a lot for their feedback system, and a thought occurred to me: anyone with their site on LiteTest can just put a feedback link on their website directly.
Under your account details where your test is listed, you can copy the link to the test and just add an <a> tag with the link to your site.
Feedback directly from your visitors and since the feedback is running on top of the site, your visitors are still able to use your site.

Website feedback from your users could prove invaluable to the progress of your website.
You might discover things that you did not even know about!
If you want your users to know more about how to give good website feedback, you can always direct them to HowToTest

Hide your email from the bots

I was doing some research into html formating for emails today and started thinking about all the "mailto" links that are spread out all over the web.

I remember seeing what crunchbase does to the email addresses the post to companies.
When I added LiteTest to the list companies on Crunchbase, they asked for the company email address. I thought nothing of it and added it.

Later on when I viewed the company profile I saw the email on the page, clear as day.
This spooked me a bit and I thought "surely they can't just post our email address out in the open like that? Bots will have a field day trolling the company pages for emails."

I took a closer look at the source of the page but the email address were nowhere to be found.
An even closer look showed me that they just url encode the javascript to print out the email on the page.

"That's clever" I thought. This should be available to everyone who wants to put their email on the site.

It did occur to me that if someone wanted to, they could still just grab all the pages, and url decode the email addresses and have them all at their spammy disposal.

What is needed is a way to make it less obvious and to give the user a bit of flexibility to how they change the email address.

I wrote a very simple script for this that I posted on LiteTest (or you can just download the script right here).

The idea is that we don't want to put the word mailto anywhere in the actual html.
Since the bots will only scrape the html looking for either at signs (@) or the mailto property in the <a> element, we simply conceal the link by changing the href attribute.

<a href="mailto:name@domain.com">Send me an email</a> can be changed to

<a href="name*domain.com" class="mailto">Send me an email</a>.

There is no hint for a bot that this is an email address, and when it tries to follow the link all it will get is a 404 page and think nothing more of it.

By including the lt.emailencode.js in your page, you can simply add this script snippet:
$(document).ready(function() {
    $(".mailto").emailencode();
});

No more bots stealing your email, and your visitors can still benefit from having instant access to mailing you without going through a contact form.

Website testing and feedback

I was recently asked by a company to give them some post-launch feedback on their new website.

This kind of website testing is an important step before a product is unleashed upon the unsuspecting public, and whenever I can I am happy to supply my expert advice.

As I was juggling between the questionnaire and the website I was testing, it occurred to me how similar this process was to the old website testing process on LiteTest (where you had to look at the website and then answer the questions), and how unwieldy this process is for doing just that, website testing.

What was even more tricky in the whole process was being able to provide good feedback in the questionnaire. As I was going through the testing process (see How To Test for some hints on doing website testing and giving feedback in this "black box" fashion) I found my self completely avoiding the feedback form and writing all the feedback in Notepad and then pasting it in to the text boxes in the questionnaire.

I quickly answered the ratings from memory, and then pasted all my site testing feedback into the tiny little text box at the bottom of the questionnaire.

The part that was most important in this process was left as a tiny text box at the end of the page. This leads me to the point I want to make with todays post:

When creating a site test questionnaire like this, it's important to analyse what you value the most and what is most important to your website at this stage in it's life cycle.

It's not finding out if 200 people thought the first page had a good design or not, it's more important to know what exactly they thought about the design, by providing textual feedback.

Ponder this scenario: you ask 200 people to rate your websites navigation and everyone gives it a score of 2 / 5 (where 5 is the best and 1 is the worst). This will tell you that 200 people think you should definitely work on your navigation. This is valuable when trending the data over time and releases, so it is really valuable data!

But what if only 2 people gave you feedback, and said "All your links in the menu are broken and all the other links in your website takes the user away from the website without opening in a new window". Now this is valuable site test feedback!

In the first scenario, you know that the website needs to improve it's navigation (I used a quite obvious case here so perhaps the author would have found this quite quickly, but imagine if this was buried on a page that didn't get much attention from the developer but would get lots of hits from the general public). This tells you that frankly, the navigation is "knackered".

In the second scenario, two users (even one would have done it in this case) told you that your navigation was bad/broken, as well as letting you know what the problem was!

This is more important than gaging the number of users who likes your navigation and gives it a rating.

So to conclude this post:

It's more important with individual feedback when looking for initial improvements and in the beginning of integrating a website test system (or just collecting feedback).

Ratings and other variable data is more important in the long run, when you want to do trending and compare your website release by release.

So when you start looking for feedback for your website, and you do your site testing, remember to put more importance on textual feedback, and do these tests often!

It's better to have a few tests done now and then than put all the horsepower into one test (as can be understood from this article here about the rule of 5 testers)

The importance of feedback

Do I need feedback?
Every website that wants to improve needs feedback.
A quick analysis of your website by a few users can give you a good insight and even scope out a few problems you did not know you had.

You only need as little as 5 users or less to get a good grasp of where you might need to improve, or to emphasise the positive sides of your product (source: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000319.html)

Feedback doesn't have to be negative. It's very common to worry about feedback being too harsh and that scares a few people into denial.

Feedback lets us improve, and the more we improve the site, the better it will be. The better the website is the more sales it will make!

How can feedback help me and how do I work with it?
What can we do with all the feedback we receive?
Organise the feedback into groups and give it weight.
As an example:
3 users think that your navigation is lacking and your website could improve its main navigation menu.
1 user thinks that your overall colour scheme is disrupting.
2 users think that your registration process is too long and difficult.

Organise the feedback into work packages.
We start with the 3 users’ opinion on the navigation. This is not a lot of work for one of the developers, and with a little bit of thought and work this can be reworked almost instantly. We put this on top of the priority list because a) it is the most common issue and b) it's quick to fix.
The second one down the list will be the one user who thought the overall colour scheme was bad. After some brief research we find that the colours we picked for the website is not ideal so we put this as the second work package.

Why did we not put the two user feedback (the registration issue) as the second work package? Because the registration process (in this hypothetical scenario) is tied in to a large portion of the website and the cost of development in time and money would be too high to give enough return on the investment. We put this as a "nice to have" issue. We save this, because we want to think about this issue for the next big development of the website.

In short: by making use of feedback we can improve our website. A simple analysis now, and some clever handling of the feedback, can lead to long term savings and improved business.

New version of LiteTest

A new version has finally been released. A comlpete facelift but things have changed under the hood as well.

We have moved to MVC amongst other things, but let's talk about some new features first:

Some of the bigger changes and aditions we have now, are the section we made for design feedback.

Users can now upload design concepts and get them rated as well as get notes on them before they go into production. This step is essential. It's all well and good to get feedback on your website when it's already created, but what if you want to know more before you spenou thed time and money on creating it?

This will give you a good starting ground to catch the most prominent design errors before you create your website.

Another big change we have made was to the actual test process. Many of our users found it tedious to move back between the test page and the actual website they were testing.

We found that the best way to accomodate this, was to move the testing process to the actual website they were testing. Now users can browse the website they are giving feedback to, while being able to provide their analysis.

LiteTest.com

Let me start by talking abit about LiteTest and why it exists.

LiteTest came up as an idea one day during a converastion about website testing.
We were talking about ideas for websites and how everyone had so many brilliant ideas, but during this conversation the topic of testing and feedback came up.

Anyone can create a website but how do we find out what others think about our website?
How can we compare our website with others? Sure we can look at page ranking, we can look at Alexa etc. but we have no way of comparing the websites side by side, by how well it is doing on it's design, content quality etc. etc.

Well, I'm getting ahead of my self a bit here, talking about comparing websites. We will get to that later.

So back to the story. I realised that I could look at my friends website, and give him feedback about his site, and he could do the same for me. That way, we would get second oppinions on our sites. This would work up to a certain point, but we would need more feedback, from various people in the web comunity.

The idea for LiteTest came when I blurted out "but what if we had one website where we could test all websites?" and that was the birth of the idea for LiteTest.

Now, what can you do with LiteTest and why would you care?
A big problem with asking your collegues, friends and family is that they will have a hard time providing useful feedback because it might not be in their nature to say what they really think (on LiteTest, we encurrage people to really say what they think about a site!). So feedback from your neightbour might be a little bit tame. Even if your friend gives you his honest opinion, there is no way to visualy compare that to what others think (unless you carry a questionaire with you).

Another option is to ask strangers in a forum: "hey, what do you think about my website?". The response you will get will be cluttered with useless information, and only a few oppinions will be useful, but without comparison or historical data this could be hard to make use of.

On LiteTest.com we decided to create a template depending on the type of site you have, that way we can guide people less knowledgable on the web through the tests. A nice rating system with a good list of feedback is worth so much more than a comment in a forum (which usually sounds like this: "Nice site, maybe some more images etc". Now that isn't going to be anything that you want to take into your next release?

But what if you could see a properly formated report?
Usability: 3.33 / 5
Content quality: 3.33 / 5
Design: 4 / 5
Navigation: 3.33 / 5
And much more, followed by a long list of feedback.

By aggregating the reports and computing a score, you can easily see what people think!

You can see an example of what report looks like here.

Once you have done a new release of your website, you can update the release version on LiteTest as well, this way you can make use of the trending feature, and see how your website is changing across the releases.

We don't charge our users for this service, we only ask that they them selves provide feedback for others websites before they get feedback for theirs.
Our curreny model ensure that everyone gets at least three or more reports on their website.

I recommend you have a look at the site.
visit LiteTest.com