Starglider Systems BlogI've been developing software and selling it on-line since 1994. Current products include STG FolderPrint Plus - a tool to Print Folders, and STGThumb - HTML Album Generator, among others. Some of my other sites - Disk Usage, Directory Printer ,Print Folders and Jejum Intermitente .
One thing that always bothered me about Google Analytics in-page click maps is that you can never tell where a customer clicked if you have several links that go to the same pages.
Now you can easily do it. Took me a couple of minutes to set it up, now I guess I'll have to wait and see if it behaves properly – usually results for these click maps were weird and really different from other services such as CrazyEgg…
Great article by Patrick McKenzie on Running a software business on 5 hours a week .
Some of the advice I found interesting:
I just started using Definition – a WooThemes theme which looks nicer than my current theme (Inspire, also by WooThemes). Not only that, but it uses Responsive design, so it looks great on tablets and smartphones.
Currently it is only on Disk Usage, one of my microsites, but I intend to use it on this blog (and possibly my main site) soon.
There are two things I really like about WooThemes:
Definition has not disappointed in these aspects, expect for a couple of minor things (a blue bar on the side of the title and Comment buttons when comments are disabled). I have contacted their support, let's see how they respond.
Update: a few hours after my support request they answered both my questions. I had an empty page that for some reason didn't show up on the other theme (so I just added a menu without it), and they sent the CSS to remove the button and divider:
.comments.button {
display: none;
}
.home .post-more-sep {
display: none;
}
Inspectlet is a web service that provides heatmaps, real time analytics, and their main selling point, videos of your users in action.
They have a very reasonable free plan – 2500 pageviews, 500 captures for a website. These seem to be split on a daily basis, however. If your site has a reasonably average daily use pattern this might not make a difference.
One nice thing about the free plan is that it covers your whole site. I have used the free Crazyegg plan for a while, and it only collects data for a page at a time.
On my personal trial, it seemed to count 17 videos for the day, but I could only see 7 in their list.
I have used the standard method to add the monitoring to my site – just a few lines of javascript added to the footer. The script is reasonably sized and loads fast.
Videos
Most of my site capture videos are very short – a few seconds. Maybe due to the nature of my site, I found very little useful information viewing them, but it is kind of interesting.
From my limited sampling, their captures seem to be very buggy. I have seen a 375×74 capture in which the user still interacted normally, and I have just seen a video where the user clicks a button and the video displays the wrong page loading (the user then proceeds to click where a button is on another page, and ends in the proper page).
Heatmaps
The eye-tracking heatmap show a visual map that uses the mouse cursor as a substitute for the user eyes. I'm not sure if this makes any sense, but they say there is research that support this. It does seem to match the expected area for my pages.
The click heatmap is just the classical map. Given how poorly it matches the actual clickable areas in the page, it seems like the display is somehow misaligned.
The scroll heatmap uses colors to show how far the users are scrolling down the page.
All heatmaps can be filtered by date (start only).
The heatmap list could really use the number of visits. Otherwise, we just know if a particular page had enough visits to make the information useful by entering each heatmap. For a large site with infrequently visited pages, I imagine this would get pretty bad.
Analytics
I have no idea how these are, as it is not included in the free plan.
Conclusion
Inspectlet still seems a little buggy, but if you ignore that, you get a lot of information on the free plan. The other plans seem to be on par to similar services. I e-mailed support once and they did answer pretty fast.
Overall, I'm still looking. It is interesting to note that Google Analytics now has a simple heatmap system, but it only use links clicked, not actual clicks (if you have several identical links on the page, they all display the same percent of clicks). It also ignores download links and anything that leaves your site. It is completely free for now, though – just go to your site in GA, Content Tab, In-page analytics.
I have just released version 4.0 of STG FolderPrint Plus.
The changes in this one are worthy of a major version:
– The PDF export system was completely replaced, and if you ever used it, you will notice the difference right away, because it is much, much faster than the old one. You also have a Export to PDF button and menu item on the Preview.
– Preview inside ZIP files. If you are always looking into compressed files and opening them to preview a single file, you'll like this one. I wrote a full post about it.
As usual (for my programs, that is), this a free upgrade for all users, and your old key will just work.
I just finished watching the last video in the DesignBoost Landing Page Design Course. As you might have guessed from the name, it covers how to build good landing pages (i.e.: that convert well for the audience they are intended for).
I took the course because I'm really not satisfied with my current landing pages (or my regular website), and it seemed like it would help.
The course consists of 24 lessons. Each lesson has one or more videos (mostly streamed online via Vimeo), and there are several PDF worksheets to guide your design work. There is also a large download pack with buttons, background and whole page designs that is quite useful.
During the course there are also links to useful resources and articles.
The course starts with defining landing pages and how to use them, including the importance of keeping them focused. It is much easier to convert a specific audience rather than try to make a single page for everyone that converts poorly for all of them. In that sense, all landing pages should have a single strategic goal and an audience in your mind. If you have several goals or audiences (search traffic, PPC, e-mail campaigns, Facebook,etc) , you should design one for each.
To that purpose, several of the lessons involve how match the traffic to the page, defining the sales funnel and conversion goals.
Next the course goes to the page copy, covering headlines, hooks and several tricks to improve conversion (such as using client or download numbers as social boast, testimonials, establishing trust and setting a sense of urgency).
Then it covers layout, design, color and how to use the helper tools and design elements in the download kit that comes with the course.
At this point, if you are following the lessons and assignments with the worksheets you should have a finished landing page design. The final lessons cover slicing (cutting the page graphical elements to convert to HTML), usability and split testing (for split testing, I have used and recommend Optimizely – see my review for more details).
Overall, the course is well thought and includes a process using worksheets so that for any landing page you need to design, you can just answer the questions and cover the guidelines in the worksheets to follow along. I personally felt that it could have had more coverage of layout options. The download pack is very useful. Given the price and time involved (took me 6 hours not counting the assignments), it is a pretty good deal.
I'll definitely go through my old landing pages now with new eyes.
97 Things Every Programmer Should Know is a collection of short essays on many programming topics – coding, testing, pair programming, and more.
You can get a full list of the essays, as well as the full content. It was a bit surprising how much shorter and less readable they seem in this format, compared to the MOBI file.
The essays are somewhat useful, but most of them cover subjects that any good programmer should already have seen elsewhere, and thus were not very useful to me.
That said, while the amount of notes that I took in this book is way below average, it still contains plenty of interesting content.
Some of the essays I found useful or interesting:
38. How to use a Bug Tracker
39. Improve Code by Removing it
41. Interprocess Communication Affects Application Response Time
52. Let Your Project Speak for Itself
56. Make the Invisible more Visible
57. Message passing Leads to Better Scalability in Parallel Systems
64. Pair Program and Feel the Flow
66. Prevent errors (using Undo logging to review error prone section)
73. Resist the Temptation of the Singleton Pattern
76. The Single Responsibility Principle (separating classes for how they change)
90. Verbose Logging will disturb your sleep
Overall I'd say that the book is worth the money and time – but just barely.
A very interesting post on Readability on Distilled .
The examples and checklist in the end are quite useful. A personal pet peeve for me is sites (as well as magazines) that don't have sufficient contrast! It is still quite common.
Of course, reading this I realize that I really should redesign my blogs and my site… Oh, well…
One common situation when I use STG FolderPrint Plus is doing a search on my graphics folder, and have a whole bunch of results that are inside ZIP files. I don't want to extract them because these are very large ZIP files, with ten of thousands of items (icons in different file types and resolutions or graphic packs mostly).
For the graphics outside the ZIP files, since a few version backs you can preview while using the Search screen. But for each file found inside a ZIP file, I open the ZIP file, find the specific file, and open it to check it out.
But now, on the first feature of FPP 4, it can also preview files inside ZIP files – so you can just click the file, and get your preview right into the program.
FPP 4 will be made available when more new features are ready.
I read Quick & Easy Keyword Optimization, Setting up a Profitable Flow of Traffic – by Karon Thackston – on record time (maybe 15 minutes) , mostly because I recently read her SEO Copywriting Flow recently. And it is on most part the same material.
So, is it any good? Yes, there are a few insights that makes SEO Copywriting Flow worth it, but for the current US$25 (US$15 with the launch discount) difference I can't recommend you get this one instead.
There are a few extra insights here, though:
So overall, I recommend that you get SEO Copywriting Flow from Amazon instead.