Monthly Archives: October 2010

How to Get Feedback for Your Website

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Like my website? Tell me more about it! Good feedback is the one thing we all seek after our store or website is set up. Ideally from someone who hasn’t been worrying over the store design for the past 24 hours.

Forums:
The first thing you might turn to are forum postings. And the community may have a few valuable insights about your store. However, you usually don’t get a lot of responses from forums and they tend to be tempered by the fear of offending you with their frank opinions.

So what other options do you have? Other than forum posts, there are many tools out there that can help. Some are free, others aren’t. Here are a few that would suit store owners who are looking to get feedback quickly.

Concept Feedback – Free feedback from a community of professionals. The site has an interesting credit system which encourages the community to give quality feedback.

Feedback Roulette - Free community driven peer review site. The idea behind this site is simple. Review other websites and other people will review your website

Feedback Army - Straight and to the point, this site offers 10 reviews for $15. They use Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to gather feedback. To protect you, you have the power to reject any poor responses that you receive.

These three tools involve little work on your part and are pretty cheap. But there is no free lunch, and it’s no surprise that the quality of feedback will vary. There are other tools out there that help you to conduct your own analysis for in-depth feedback. Here are some others for you to check out.

  • Five Second Test – Analyze the most prominent elements of your design.
  • Usabilla - Remote usability testing to get visual feedback on your website.
  • Click Tale – Record visitor actions and detailed heat maps.
  • Userfly - Record user visits.
  • Clixpy - Track everything your site’s users do.
  • Crazy Egg – Visualize every click your visitors make.

Here are some other excellent sources of information for your reading pleasure!

Not a Smooth Landing (Page)

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A few days ago, we got an interesting email from one of the merchants we work with. She pointed us to a competitor whose referral marketing campaigns uses landing pages. So if someone wants to recommend the store, they’re directed to a webpage with a box that looks like this:

They would then type the email addresses of friends into the box or let the page access their email account to slurp in their contact list.

This turns out to be pretty different from the way we do it. Once ReferralCandy is hooked up and running, it simply sends an email off to each customer after they make their first purchase. The customer then forwards the email to anyone they think would be interested, from inside the email client itself.

She liked the landing page idea and asked if we had something like that to offer.

Actually, we did previously consider adding a landing page to our campaigns. However, we ultimately decided against it for a bunch of reasons that have been confirmed by other merchants we’ve worked with.

We designed our referral flow to make it as effortless as possible to pass the recommendation message along. With a landing page, it’s no longer as easy for customers since they need to dig their friends’ email addresses out and enter them into the web form. Although this is only a little more effort, it causes conversion rates to take a hit.

So what about giving the website direct access to your contact list for it to pull in email addresses? That’s gotta be pretty easy right? Well… people are getting more wary of this practice since it’s what a spammer would do and could give you a bad reputation. In general, giving any website full access to your address book is a no-no.

We might offer a landing page option in the future, but it would only be after we figure out how to make it as simple and as safe as possible for the merchant’s customer. Since ultimately that is what’s best for the merchant as well.

First SEO Checks

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My online store is finally up and running, now what about SEO?

In a perfect world, you’d already have incorporated extensive SEO into your online store while you were setting it up. (You’d also have learnt karate, CPR and cryptography, and you’d have designed a better Internet while simultaneously ending poverty and discrimination.)

Let’s be real, though. Doing business is a complex affair, and if you waited until you were completely ready, you’d never get started. So cheers to you for getting underway. 

The quest for better SEO begins with a deceptively simple idea: SEO is about “pleasing” Search Engines.

What do you do with that knowledge?

The two things you can do to improve your SEO immediately without technical know-how: Improve the clarity and navigation of your site.

1. THE CLARITY CHECK

You want your visitors to know immediately what your site is about. Attention is an incredibly precious commodity on the Internet – there are distractions tugging at you from everywhere. (Other tabs, IMs, social media, you name it.)

We easily forget this when we’re looking at our own sites, but we’re typically merciless with not-too-clear sites when we come across such examples.

When people access your website for the first time, the first thing they would like to know is exactly what your website is about. Make it difficult for them to do so, and you’ll lose them as a customer.

I came across this blog post which describes a quick but effective test that you can carry out, the 3-second page content check.

The check: Load a random page on your website and ask someone not familiar with it to tell you what that page is about after a 3-second look.

To make things real, I applied this test to several Shopify shops and here are the results.

Indestructible Dog

The Indestructible Dog shopify store screenshotWhen I hit this website I was immediately struck by the graphic in the middle and the interesting smaller images below. While the images were eye-catching, I couldn’t see how an old school television set, dogs and the big brown object fit together. Looking around more, I got that it was selling dog snacks or toys but then my three seconds were up.

Results – Love the branding! But it could do with more descriptive text and titles on their home page products.

Nest Living
Nest Living Website

Entering this site is like walking into a furniture store, which is exactly what it was.

The five thumbnails showing the different areas of the store (Shop – Dining, Living.. etc.) were also very helpful to me to get a sense of what they sold.

Beat the 3 seconds flat. Results – Great job with clarity!

Open Door Vintage

OpenDoorVintage website screenshot

This site was straightforward and to the point. I quickly got that the site was selling vintage dresses for women from the many images of dresses on the front page. The clarity was good but it was only after multiple visits that I realized they also sold items for men!

Results – Site is almost there! It just needs to do more to make its product offerings apparent .

2. NAVIGATION CHECK

A well-structured, intuitive site makes it easy for a person to explore your site.

A good navigation bar will not only make the site more accessible, it will also help a person to determine what the site is about.

To see what I mean, compare the two navigation bars below:

Max & Mia Organics

Max & Mia Website Navigation Bar

I can roughly tell what Max & Mia Organics is about just from the navigation bar.

They also have drop down boxes from the menu to display their product’s sub-categories. The navigation menu shows their entire product line with a hierarchy included, to allow for easy browsing.

Open Door Vintage

Open Door Vintage Navigation Bar

Open Door Vintage Navigation Bar

Contrast that with the Open Door Vintage navigation menu.

I love the clarity of purpose that Open Door Vintage displays in its home page, but its navigation menu could do more to highlight its product range.

Remember the previous check in which we didn’t know at first glance that they offered men’s clothes too? They can go a long way to fix this by tweaking the menu to show their product range the way that Max & Mia did.

ONCE YOU ARE DONE…

Besides helping with SEO, these two steps will also help to improve the sales conversion rate of your online store.

Your site should now be ready for more technical SEO challenges!