Let’s start this post off with some general bits of good advice for your website or blog. I’m guessing you will agree that they would be good tips, in general.
- Limit pictures on your home page – Slow loading downloads often equal high bounce rates on a home page
- KISS – I think we all know to keep it simple, right?
- Don’t use popups
- Don’t use flash
Some pretty basic tips, and I would say good advice in general. Unfortunately, those tips could be horrible advice for your site. The secret to improving your website is by analyzing your own site first. It’s not by going to another site for a bunch of canned answers.
Your site should be designed with two major things in mind: getting users to complete the primary site objective (even if it is to just get an email), and making it as easy as possible for the user to achieve that objective. Using well established usability techniques is usually a good idea, but sometimes those techniques interfere with the site objective.
Your Best Advice for Improving Your Site is Often Found On Your Competitors Sites
Let me put it to you this way. When I first started this site, I knew that web users tend not to vertically scroll, and that they often bounce on home pages with tons of pictures and too much content. Using my own advice on my home page, I should only show one post, and have no images in it. Boring! It’s also not what my audience expects.
When I started this site as a blog I had five posts, and maybe one or two of those had images on the home page. I was gently loading up the home page, kind of playing the middle of the line. It worked, traffic was slowly increasing, I had no real complaints.
What I realized though, is that I forgot to really look at my competitors. I did look at them. I did do a market analysis, but I really didn’t jump on what the industry leaders were doing. I was just building a blog. How hard it that? I also thought my site would be better because I knew a lot about web usability. I over generalized the site, and I over generalized the readers.
When I realized that I forgot about Jakob Nielsen’s advice that users spend most of their time on sites besides your own, I knew I had a great opportunity to improve my site. What does Jakob’s advice mean? It means users are used to, and they expect certain things. Those things are how the industry leaders are already doing it, even if they are not the best way. It’s what your target audience expects.
If I were to run some of those automated tests you find online on my site today, I would see message like “too long to download” or “too many images”. They offer good advice, but horrible advice for my audience. Great answers don’t come from generic lists, or computerized website tests. They come from self analysis, a market analysis, and a plan.
Best Thing For This Site
So what was the best thing I ever did for this website? I wrote this post: Expectations of Blog Readers Reveal 8 Common Traits. To write that post I had to do research. I had to look at my competitors, I had to look at other bloggers. Throwing content to the side, I wanted to know what blog readers liked about those sites. What I found was 8 common traits. I implemented them all, at least the best I could, and my numbers started instantly going up a lot faster.
A little analytical data? Comparing my site stats from that blog’s post date, June 11th to now, and the equal number of days in the rear here is what happened to me.
- 22% increase in total unique visitors
- 44% increase in total page views
- 18% increase if page view per session
- 3% decrease in bounce
- And an 88% increase average time on site!!!
What am I doing now? I’m doing another analysis on my competitors. It could be the next best thing that I do to this site!
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