Sometimes you just have to bite your tongue, or in the case of blogging, sit on your hands.
If your blog is about improving websites, like this one, ranting about politics could be the worse thing you or I could do. This morning, the urge for me to get off topic ranting about politics was at an all time high.
Knowing that I often unfollow people who express political opinions that oppose me, I decided to turn it into a reminder for others to keep it keep on topic. Continue reading »
This is just a quick post to about the special I am having on my usability and design analysis. There is just one week left to get the analysis for just $19.95.
Get BWI’s web usability and design analysis, and learn how to improve your websites function, forms, navigation, design, and a whole lot more! This is not just another ebook, or an automated test. Get a real, detailed site review covering 35 points, a written conclusion, and suggestions.
The next three people that order will also get a free review about your website or service that I post on this site. Continue reading »
I’ve done it before, and I’m doing it again. For the next two weeks, now until December 18th, 2009, I will be running a promotion on my Web Usability and Design Analysis. The regular price is $29.95, but for the next two weeks you can get it for just $19.95.
If you have a website, and are trying to improve it, you definitely qualify as potential customer that may want one. If your site is going nowhere, no matter how much marketing you put into it, you qualify as a potential customer that needs one. Continue reading »
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.
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. Continue reading »
I decided to give a little surprise today, a free web usability and design analysis! If you are the first one to comment on this post you get a free Web Usability and Design Analysis! In your comment make sure you say “I want a free analysis!”. I will then contact you by using the email in your comment submission.
To see what the analysis is all about check it out here: Web Usability and Design Analysis
Jakob Nielson announced today that the input from just two users on your website could vastly improve your chance of making correct UI decisions.
I thought this great timing for one of my polls that asks, “Have you ever watched at least five people complete a task on your website?” Right now, looking at the results 38% of you have said no to this poll. There may be more than you that would have said yes if the question had ask if you had seen just two, but I am guessing many of you will still say no. Getting my analysis could be an easy way for you to get at least one new person, and it’s from one who knows many common usability mistakes made. Continue reading »
Website got you down? Looking for that solve all fix to get it rolling as planned? If you are asking yourself, or searching the web for a way to fix your site, know that it’s probably not going to be just one thing to really get it moving as planned. You really need to step back, you need to clearly define your site to yourself, and then move from there. As my little banner says, “Analyze, Streamline, Convert”.
There are all sorts of free online test you can do to help improve your site, but the best thing you can do is to truly define your site to yourself. What’s the primary objective? Does it have more than one objective? Are you accomplishing any of the sites objectives well? Does it even have an objective besides getting tons of visitors?
Before you go out testing your site, repairing code, making new logos, stuff like that, know what and why you are doing it. If you do not have a clear objective for your site other than traffic, you will get no traffic, at least any that is worth anything.
So you may be asking why should I spend $79.95 on getting BWI’s Web Usability and Design Analysis? The most important reason is the fact that it’s someone else’s eyes that will be determining the quality of your site. This is extremely critical because the odds are, you most likely want someone besides yourself to visit your website, and not everyone sees the world the way you do.
Way, way, way too often websites get built without one simple review from another person. Are you sure your site works fine? I’ve seen plenty of order forms that don’t work, and you know the webmaster want those forms to work. If your sites business plan is focused on making a profit, getting a heuristic analysis like this is essential. It’s more than a critical bashing of form and fashion, though this often occurs. It can find failure in your primary site message, and what’s more important than that?
Another reason you should get professional advice is because there is time tested reasoning, practical testing, and “in the know” experience that can quickly point out serious errors that may not be easily recognized and occurring on your site right now.
Getting feedback from others is great, and is something I value most. Unfortunately feedback from others is often difficult to develop a plan from. Comments like “It’s great” or “It’s OK” doesn’t mean much. Hundreds of “It’s Great” would be nice, but it still doesn’t tell you, as a webmaster, how to improve a site. Positive feedback may even decrease your sales. If your goal is to sell something, and all you do is cater to the positive feedback that, say for example, your site has great resources. Your focus might move toward pushing new visitors onto those resources. An initial plan to sell and make money has now been put on the back burner to accommodate general visitor feedback. Oops!
Having a heuristic analysis is critical to the things that matter most to you, getting visitors to accomplish your sites primary objective. An analysis is structured, it identifies known industry problems for visitors, and in the case of Best Web Image’s analysis, give reasoning for all of it’s findings.
Best Web Image’s Web Usability and Design Analysis can almost be used as a basic website standard for new and old webmasters. An actual standard for websites goes way beyond the analysis, but to give you an example what I mean here is the first item of business, Title of Site. It looks at the length, the keyword quality, and the “does it even make sense” quality. It would even identify if the title would make a poor bookmark. The first item of the analysis could substantially improve your return visitor rate, search engine positioning, usability, and credibility. ROI could be accomplished with this one bit of information. The analysis continues this way covering basic items that most webmasters simply don’t pay attention to, and they really should. Another example would be to see if your site has a contact page. It does? Good, well the analysis doesn’t stop there. It reports the quality of the contact page, ways it could be improved, and reasoning on how a poor contact page could effect your sales.
The entire analysis, thirty five checks in all, offer extremely valuable checks for any webmasters. It looks at: navigation, site credibility, basic design concepts, forms, and the effectiveness of those forms. Many of the items on the list are expected by most web surfers, but as webmasters we often forget what all of those items are. The analysis checks for site inconsistencies, accessibility features or lack of, and its development for search engines. Delete all the answers from an analysis and a webmaster could use this repeatedly for all of their sites.
Two additional key factors for the analysis is the “Why It Matters” for every item looked at, and the conclusion of findings. It’s one thing to have someone tell you why you should change, it has a little more value though when there is substantial reasoning why. The conclusion of the analysis is a “What I would do first if this were my site” comment.
Your analysis might reveal several things that could use some improvement, and fixing them all at once might not be practical. Having knowledge of what should be fixed first reflects the level of importance, and will help a new webmaster in their decisions on what, if any, changes should be made.
To get the thirty-five point analysis you can go here: Web Usability and Design Analysis – Expectations should be set on “High”.
Regardless of experience levels, webmasters are repeatedly impressed by this really, low cost report.
If you are the first one to comment on this post you get a free Basic Usability and Design Analysis for the website of your choice!
In your comment make sure you say “I want a free analysis!â€. I will then contact you by using the email in your comment submission. How easy is that?
My dad was a quality control manager for his whole career in the frozen food industry. I guess a little of that rubbed off on me because, it is how I often see myself reviewing sites. I have heard of all sorts of stories about how food has been handled, good and bad. Mostly though, those in charge understand the value of quality, and will spend thousands, to millions of dollars to achieve it. With food, it can mean life or death to the customer, and to the company producing it, it could mean good press or the press that can destroy a business. A bad website won’t kill a visitor, but it could certainly influence how a visitor thinks about your company.
After examining the site BusinessLights.com, I found a site that was built to sell, and had obviously spent some extensive time and money properly optimizing their site for search engines. They sell light bulbs, a lot of light bulbs. Something they may have skipped though, was a simple quality control check. Something my basic analysis would have easily picked up on. Fortunately for them though it’s an easy fix.
If you look at their footer on the home page, you will noticed the font style does not match the rest of the site.
Consistency in font type is an easy fix, and can make a huge difference in giving your site that professional appearance. Looking at another page, I even found an inconsistency in font type within the footer itself. If you look at the footer in their Light Bulb Product Index you can see the font displaying the phone information on the right does not match the address information on the left.
It’s the little differences like this that give visitors clues about the trustworthyness of a site. Would you buy a bag of frozen corn if the bag didn’t look like it was sealed properly? The same visual indicators effect websites the same way.
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Free Usability and Design Analysis
OK. So a while back I started my Site Feedback category. For those of you that don’t know about it, I make a new post every Friday about one of your sites. In the post I request visitors to visit the the site in review, and then offer feedback about it on the post. Website owners value the feedback, and a little bit of free publicity. I value the posts because it gets a lot of attention from webmasters, my target audience. The most important group though, the ones making the review get nothing though. That’s a problem.
So What’s in It for You the Reviewer?
So in the past I simply hoped that some of you would make some comments on the reviews. I encouraged other webmasters to make comments, and at first it seemed to work. Without my encouragement though, it’s border line dead. Yesterdays post has only received one comment so far, and it was the final straw for me. Something has to be done to get visitors to want to write a review. So here is what I am going to do.
The Prize
So far now on, when a site Feedback post (not including this one) gets TEN unique quality comments, I will give away a free usability and design analysis. This offer will even work on previous posts that have not yet received ten posts. What makes a unique and quality comment? To make a comment unique, I mean the authors website is unique. On the comment form there is a spot to fill in your website url. Make sure you fill this out. It’s the site I will do the analysis on. What defines comment quality? Comments like, “I like it, it’s great” don’t say anything, nor do the offer the webmaster anything to work with. You can say you like/dislike, but you must give an example why. That is what will make it high quality.
When a post gets the ten unique comments I will simply use a random number generator to pick. I will contact you by the email used to submit the comment, and let you know you won. It’s as simple as that. I will also make a comment on the post that a winner has been picked. So if you don’t see my comment about a winner feel free to make a comment. You could still win, even if there is more than ten comments.
Hope to start seeing more of your comments!