Joel Pinkham

Big Jake (aka Jakob Nielsen, usability guru), wrote an article in 2005 about 10 common blog design mistakes. Sadly, 5 years down the track a lot of them are still common. I’m guilty of a few of them, and although it’s only basic stuff it’s extremely common for blogs to look past these simple things.

The biggest takeaway for me: Don’t hide your “classic hits”

Do you have some blog posts you’re really proud of? How easy can someone find these from your homepage? Perhaps try adding a sidebar widget to promote your best work, or even a feature above your blog posts on your homepage (easy if you have Wordpress). Luckily for me, everything I blog is rubbish so it’s not an issue.

Remember when someone comes to your blog homepage – they most likely want to know about you. It’s not always the most relevant for the first thing they see to be  your latest blog post. What if your last post was a YouTube video of talking animals? What does that say about you?

What should you do now?

I’m not the expert on it – so you should probably just read his article. But my favourite quote (and I admit to being one of this people)

Many weblog authors seem to think it’s cool to write link anchors like: “some people think” or “there’s more here and here.”

It’s always exciting to make a big change on your website – the people involved on the project always have an interest in making the site look “good” and “improving” it.

What happens so often though – we get it wrong.

The problem is these are very subjective changes. A lot of the time the good look changes harm functionality and results. Which in my mind, are more important.

I got it wrong

In the last few weeks I’ve been through this scenario. I’m confident I went about it the right way and know what I’m doing, but plain and simply I got it wrong.

I started off looking at the Analytics – seeing how people were using the homepage and understood the metrics that needed improving. Around these I creating a strategy to “improve” the stats and along the way make it “look better”.

In reality, bounce rate has risen from 40% to 55%. There has been some positives out of it, but 15% of your traffic now leaving the site instead of browsing is a huge amount of the audience lost.

My point is – what you think should be done on a website is often wrong.

Solution – Don’t think, TEST

Solution – don’t think, test. I don’t mean focus groups or asking user feedback. This particular homepage tested well in that regard. When the Analytics figures came in though, it failed.

The Amazon Test

Amazon are a perfect example for testing before implementing. When any change is to be made, they sample a small amount of their traffic and measure the impact.

For example before changing the location of the “add to cart” button on their product page, they would try 5 different options over 2% of their visitors and see which one increased conversion rate the most.

Unlike the real word though, they are fortunate enough to have the resources and the traffic to pull it off. If you’re only getting a couple of hundred visitors a day, this kind of test would take a long time. So do what you can within your means, but don’t assume anything.

Bounce rate will impact your search rankings. We can never be certain about how search engines rank pages – but here’s my logic on this…

The problem with most SEO’s is that they are focussed on getting rankings. Sometimes the easiest way to get rankings is using ‘techniques’. More and more often though I see search results rankings that can not be explained by SEO techniques. Inbound links, title tags and good quality content are of course important, but certainly not the be all and end all.

Let’s take a step back here.

What is the point of a search engine?
To help a person find the information they are looking for.

So, when a user types something in they want to find something related to what they typed in.

What is the point of a search engine ranking sites?
To help a person find the best possible information for what they are looking for.

So logically the order of search results should show the best site, with the best content, and the most relevant to a persons search words.

OK, that’s obvious – what’s my point?
The best site has content that the person wants and is easy for them to get.

The trouble is that Google is not a person. It’s pretty close, but at the end of the day it’s an algorithm. It needs to a way to logically determine which site is best.

To measure this best factor Google is going to use a bunch of things to determine a web pages score. User experience is of course a huge factor if a human was going to score a website. Google can’t tell a good design, or if something is interactive and capitvating for people viewing. What they can measure though, is the bounce rate* of a site.

It’s a dead give away to search engines that your site didn’t match the users expectations, why else would they be leaving.

My advice is to always think about users first and search engines should be kept happy naturally.

*Bounce rate refers to the percentage of visitors to your site who leave after seeing just one page. For example, 100 people visit your homepage, and 25 of them decide to leave without viewing any other pages. This would mean you have a bounce rate of 25%

This is one of the best quotes I’ve read for a while:

The basic point about the web is that it is not an advertising medium. The web is not a selling medium; it is a buying medium. It is user controlled, so the user controls, the user experiences.

This comes from Jakob Nielsen, the godfather of web usability. While I definitely think he’s taking a bit far, he does make a very good point and gives marketers something to think about.

I think advertising has it’s place on the internet, so long as you actually have something that adds value to the users and isn’t too intrusive. This is why search marketing is so effective. It adds value to the user by giving them extra solutions for their problem they are looking to solve. It isn’t intrusive and doesn’t distract the user from their goal.