I’m inquisitive but I’m not desperate

I’m wondering when the tide is going to turn on the matter of requiring users to fill in lengthy forms in order to download a software demo, an e-book, a white paper or in some cases even a brochure.

You’ve gone to all the trouble of getting someone to your site – whether that’s by SEO, an advert or just random luck. You promise a download, often with just a click. Then you start asking for my inside leg measurement.

When I see a form like this, I immediately wonder: ‘Do I get what I asked for immediately? Are my details vetted before I get it? Are my details getting added to a mailing list?’

When are site owners (or their retarded designers/developers/consultants who say ‘and we can gather names by getting people to register for this’) going to get it? What’s important to you, getting your information/product/idea into people’s hands, hearts and minds, or building a list that is ultimately worthless junk? Are you that worried about counting the number of downloads and think the only way to do it is to require someone’s details? And once you’ve given someone access to it, who is to say they won’t spread it round ‘virally’ anyway? Or do you wish you could stop that too?

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Case study – the sports bar – part two – website optimisation

Limited by the brief (and time and budget) to reworking the existing design, rather than replace with a Wordpress driven site (my personal preference), below is a list of the basic SEO and general site changes I made.

1. More meaningful title tags, meta descriptions and keywords
2. Logo/header graphic turned back into a single image and named more explicitly (no longer img01.gif, img02.gif).
3. Replaced Flash navigation with text links
4. Homepage now contains the text that had previously been on the About page and a smaller image rather than just an image and no text.
5. Renamed a couple of menu items to make more sense to users (Live Sports > What’s On, Events > Specials [the word for special offers in Czech is the same as the word for events, essentially this was a mistranslation])
6. Changed from static html to php so we can use includes for header and footer information, making further edits easier
7. Navigation inconsistencies (opening a new window for the food and drinks menu pages) have been corrected.
8. Removed Flash audio player
9. Switched Flash schedule player for a simple text file include, schedule now displays on the page, as text, and is searchable.
10. Added a Google Map to the contact page – there was no map there previously.
11. Google Analytics tracking code added for ease of statistics monitoring.

Based on the first few days of stats from Analytics we will be able to judge the efficacy of these changes. The initial keywords that are bringing in traffic are purely the name of the bar – serving to highlight that the site’s SEO was pretty poor. The Pagerank as of today is 2/10 and the site is not coming up in the first few pages of organic search results (SERPS). I will cover how this situation has changed in a month or so.

If you can’t see it, you can’t buy it

online store usability on a budget

The way news kiosks display as much as they possibly can serves as an interesting example for the world of online shopping and explains just why thorough user testing and analysis of how all your visitors behave is so important.

Just have a think about your own behaviour in a shop. You wander the aisles of the drugstore or supermarket, unable to fathom what kind of twisted logic is responsible for the MLP (Merchandise Layout Plan). 

What drives this behaviour is likely a mixture of stubbornness and a fear of embarrassment (“yes madam, it’s right here”) often combined with an inability to find a member of staff.

What happens when there’s nobody to ask? You hunt around, sometimes find what you’re after, sometimes give up.

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