PaulGSmith.com: Web Analytics, Usability and More

I just read a great post by Bruce Eckel about Collective Stupidity: Why does a company full of smart people make stupid decisions? How do we keep it from happening?If you accept that the inevitable growth that comes with success leads most organizations away from effective use of small teams, then you must think about how we preserve tribe-like small teams in a large organization. Could be interesting to think through the implications for large societies as well as large organizations.

Is it more productive to get up and busy at the crack of dawn or is it better to be a late riser? This is an intersting article from a site all about tips for transforming your life. This is some interesting fuel for thought that applies to those of us who “know” we get our best work done later in the day. So maybe you should hit that snooze or just turn off the alarm altogether. And don’t feel bad about it!

LOL, this is way too funny. Seems there is a Smart Car epidemic striking in NYC, and the locals are left voicing their concerns that “there goes the neighborhood.”

Seems that some of the local residents have considered moving out in response to the gentrification of their neighborhood. This is way too funny!

Wonder what will happen when this Smart Car epidemic strikes hard here in Louisville? There is even a great commercial on myspace showing just how dangerous these little cars can be.

Given that many designers and marketing professionals often get usability wrong, what should we do to help make us more likely to succeed? Steve Krug, in his classic book “Don’t Make Me Think” quickly identifies five important things you can do to make sure your visitors see and understand as much about your site as possible.

1. Create a clear visual heirarchy on each page.
2. Take advantage of conventions.
3. Break pages up into clearly defined areas.
4. Make it obvious what’s clickable.
5. Minimize noise.

Creating a clear visual heirarchy does not just apply to navigation. It means putting important text in larger fonts, setting important text off from the rest of the text, grouping related objects together, and properly nesting related content on our web pages. Ignoring these factors leads to confusion. Most of the time a visitor can figure it out, but often you are just making them work way too hard.

Conventions are those things we have all come to expect on a website. Most visitors have come to expect a logo or company identification in the upper left-hand corner of the page. Most visitors expect a search box in the upper right-hand corner of the web page. Most of us know how to work the shopping cart on amazon.com or bestbuy.com. But designers often want to show that their site is different and unique, or we think that there is just something so different about how we do business that we ignore these conventions. Far mor often than not this leads to a bad web experience.

Breaking pages up into clearly defined areas allows a visitor to quickly find the right area of the page to focus on. It is simply amazing how often it is not clear what is clickable on a web page.  We designers have to avoid buttons that are too subtle; they are too often just hard to understand. And lastly, keep the noise under control. Pages that are simple, easy to read, and have adequate whitespace are much easier to use.

Addressing the on-page and off-page factors is really the best way to ensure your pages are relevant for the appropriate keywords. And the best way to do this is to take time and create a traffic improvement plan that includes a continuous series of systematic changes, testing, and evaluation.

However, if you really want to get listed or improve your traffic quickly, the I would always recommend some kind of pay-per-click (PPC) marketing. A PPC campaign using a tool like Google Ad Words can produce measurable results in minutes and get you to the top of almost any search result page. However, it will cost you. You must be careful in any PPC campaign since you are paying for each of the visitors to your site. PPC marketing is an extremely powerful tool in any search engine optimization plan.