Starglider Systems Blog
Your Landing Page Sucks – an interesting article on Unbounce showing some very nice landing pages, and then analyzing what he likes and what he'd change or test on each of them.
I have been hearing so much about A/B Testing that I will have to get the time and do decent landing pages for the site. Currently what I have are just minor thematic variations on the product pages…
Another interesting article by Ben Hunt – author of Convert!, Save the Pixel, and also the Pro Web Design Course (which I am taking, but haven't reviewed yet).
When redesigning the site with WordPress, he kept the standard meta description for WordPress – and that includes the post date. For articles that are several years old, this can have serious impact on CTR (Clickthrough rates) – no one wants to get stale information that no longer applies.
Fixing WordPress to have the date display only for the first three months improved the CTR pretty quick.
Another option would be setting the meta description manually using a plugin (which may give you better CTR, since you can say exactly what you want). Of course, that can be a lot of work for large numbers of posts.
Interesting article by Ben Hunt – author of Convert!, Save the Pixel, and also the Pro Web Design Course (which I am taking, but haven't reviewed yet).
There is a common theme in many books about SEO – 40% of the clicks go to the first ranking position, 11% to the second, and so on until by position 10 you can count about 99% of all clicks for a given search.
Ben took the data from Google Webmaster Tools for his top keywords and charted it. From his data it is pretty clear that you not only have to get a good ranking – you need a good text snippet and title that convinces the user that your page is what he needs.
An important conclusion is that you need to have good titles and meta descriptions. While viewing the video I realized that my blog didn't have meta descriptions (some themes seem to use excerpts, other don't).
I immediately added WPMU's DEV SEO, which seems to cover what I need and more.
I recommend that you look into your pages meta-descriptions, too…
Interesting article about how to make Coming Soon pages succeed.
I really liked Silverback's parallax effect (resize the page to see the effect).
Fog Creek, of the world famous FogBugz, had an interesting blog post about how they redesigned their web page.
It covers what was wrong with their web page – I was a little surprised to see that it took 8 clicks to get a price quote! – and what they did, and are doing, to improve it.
It really is very clear at a glance that the new page is much better, and the redesign reminded me of all the design principles that were covered in Save the Pixel and Convert!.
I do wish they shared hard numbers on the conversion improvements, though.
Interesting article on aWeber's blog.
Popover forms are inline forms that pop in a web page (thus avoiding pop-up blockers). A lot of people use them to request sign-ups for e-mail lists, and in this article, over a couple of tests, looks like they got better results with faster times.
I would have thought that longer times would help the user get interested on what you say. (I guess that depends on if they are more interested AFTER reading your content or BEFORE…)
Of course, given the anecdotal nature of the data, it is probably best to run your own split tests for this.
MailChimp just had an interesting blog post about the new authentication system from AlterEgo that they have started using.
But what I found most interesting about the article is the study they made of leaked passwords. Using a file that was hacked from a blog network and posted online, they discovered that 25000 accounts on their service matched the e-mail. Out of those, 7000 used the same password – a much larger amount than they expected. And certainly much more than I did.
While AlterEgo's system is much less secure than RSA token, it is free and adds some security.
An interesting article on Aweber with suggestions to get high open rates for your e-mail.
The suggestion I liked the most – using the logo alternate text for the textthat is usually extracted from the first line. I didn't know online e-mails did that for logos, and it solves having an awkward first line, sometimes separated from the rest of the e-mail (or the traditional Click here to View this online).
One of the functions of STG FolderPrint Plus is to list MP3.
It allows you to choose between several fields, such as title, artist, album, genre, year etc and include them when you print, export or view your MP3 list.
You can also select specific files to print when you list MP3. That way you can easily make a list of music by a band, genre or year.
You can also do batch Move/Copy of MP3 Lists- for example, if you decide that you want your music in a folder with the Artist Name, then the Album name, you can do it in a few clicks.
You can also rename automatically using the MP3 Tags, which is very useful if your MP3 Player just displays a part of the file name – you can then put the song name first so it will display properly.
Google Analytics has some new features in a limited pilot – Multi-channel funnels.
These will allow new insights in your marketing campaigns, such as AdWords, Facebook, Twitter and more.
Check this article for more.