June 23, 2010
Guest Post By Heather Rast, Director of Marketing at Clickstop, Inc.
Sometimes, it’s what you know.
Taco building is an art form. To enjoy the perfect taco, you have to master ingredient proportion within the boundaries of the fragile crunchy shell. It helps if you have the right tools (like the taco stand, so you can use both hands to fill the shell and keep the goodies tucked inside) and know the right tips (weight all ingredients with a ribbon of sour cream drizzled end-to-end to help ‘containerize’ the yummy goodness). Voila! You’re ready to enjoy yourself.
Tackling a site improvement or migration project can be looked at the same way. And yes, you really will get a similar satisfying feeling when you’re done, having used tools and techniques that produced high quality, efficient results.
Here are some recommendations to get you started:
1. The 37Signals’ Basecamp product is a planning and project management tool for everyone, designers to geeks alike. It allows team members to collaborate around common projects, adding comments and sharing attachments in a centralized manner. And their other products like Backpack (intranet) and Campfire (instant messaging) are pretty useful, too.
2. Mockingbird is a great cloud-based program for developing wireframes. Before you invest the time or the dollars in generating visual designs (which usually means you’re backward-engineering functionality into the site, a real no-no), use a wireframing tool to lay out functional elements for home and interior pages. The system is drag-and-drop, and output is easy to share with stakeholders via link or PDF.
3. Consider deploying a survey instrument (4Q and SurveyMonkey are good ones to use) to gather feedback from site visitors about their online experience with your site. Be sure to focus questions to address user objectives (yours would naturally dovetail theirs, strategically speaking). Usability issues like readability, information flow and navigation are key areas. Provided you have strong relationships with your customers, you can also consider emailing a segment with a request to participate in a survey so that you might improve to better serve them in the future. An incentive may or may not be necessary for adequate participation.
4. If you suspect that your site presents usability issues (and your analytics should help inform that, from cart abandonment info to bounce rates and top exit pages, etc.), consider the value a semi-structured usability test would provide. A pretty site is pretty senseless if visitors can’t find what they’re searching for. Userfly is one option to try.
5. Other great ways to gain insight into how visitors actually interact with your site are possible through programs like Clicktale and CrazyEgg. That logo that so-and-so wants to be even bigger? Learn if it’s actually a distraction point, sideswiping visitors from their intended path. Another option is AttentionWizard, a product of SEO sherpa Tim Ash. When performing your landing page A/B split testing, these tools can also provide valuable information to help you determine what’s working and what isn’t.
6. LinkChecker offers several methods for testing all links within a given domain. It’s important to determine all broken links associated with an existing site prior to establishing 301 redirects for the new site.
7. Crossbrowsertesting is a virtual test lab, determining how your new site will “look” to various browsers and operating systems. Don’t mistakenly omit a significant segment of your audience due to improper testing or careless assumptions (not everyone leaves JavaScript turned on).
8. Google Website Optimizer is a handy way to determine which content (visual design, layout, content, infographic) appeals most to your visitors and helps boost conversion.
Surely, this is a short list of a lot of possible tools. Hopefully this list in conjunction with one of my related posts (The Big Chalupa: How to successfully migrate a large eCommerce site) will get you started toward the migration path on the right foot.
Heather Rast is Director of Marketing at Clickstop, Inc., a multi-brand, multi-channel merchant operating in several specialty categories including moving blankets, cat trees, and radiant barrier insulation. Clickstop’s goal is to grow sales and improve margins for its brands through strategic use of inbound marketing techniques. A seventeen-year veteran integrated marketer, Heather also writes the Insights and Ingenuity blog where she covers brand building, customer experience, and social media for business.
See Part 1 of This Post Series: The Big Chalupa: How to Successfully Migrate a Large eCommerce Site
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I would suggest give Clicktale a try. I’ve been using it for 2 months and it is neat to watch what your users do, I learned a lot.
In Spanish and Portuguese you can use http://www.suipit.com is good too!
Visit it and try it!
Coming soon will be in english!
Juanito
For project/task management I would recommend checking 5pmweb.com
Basecamp was a good option for a long time, but got a bit outdated and comes with a short list of features.
5pm, has powerful features like interactive Timeline, customized interface, etc, while still managing to keep it all inside a simple and tight interface.
I would like to add that DeskAway (www.deskaway.com) is a simple yet powerful tool to collaborate on projects and simplify the way you work!