Just released is my new e-commerce store www.thinkwargames.com.
This is something I've been working on in my evenings and weekends for the last 6 months or so. It's built using ASP.NET MVC 2, .NET Framework 4 and has a Silverlight 4 backend. The framework it sits on is a very early release of GibeCommerce, a commerce platform we're working on for creating small to medium e-commerce sites at Gibe.
One of the things I've been looking into recently is how to tweak sites to maximise the conversion rate of visitors. As an example let's look at the birthday brain, this is a site I've developed as a bit of a side project.
The key area of the homepage is the login/register box, the key objective of this page is to get readers to understand the service and register. The secondary objective is to make it clear what the service is about to search engines.
The original design of the login register block looked liked this:
While there is nothing wrong with this design it does hide the register box away under the login box. User's who have already registered will be taken straight to their reminders if they check the remember box and can easily spot the login boxes if not. So making the register button a bit more obvious by swapping the two around seems like an obvious change. This is what we end up with:
A small change but how do we know how big a change it would make if any? I setup the page so a querystring would change which version you were looking at so ?ver=2 would display the new version then setup this in Google's Web Optimizer. This service directs users to one or the other version from google, it then tracks the conversions on the site and shows a graph for each showing the conversion rate. The old version already had a very good conversion rate of 9.28%. The new version however managed to convert 10.7% a very decent 1.42% improvement for an hours work!
Steve Temple Ltd has been reformed into Gibe Digital, a new Bristol based web agency which I've setup with ex Dare account director Pete Williams. I'll still be keeping this site going as my personal site and blog but we'll be expanding the Gibe site with a blog and clients section over the next couple of weeks. So keep your eyes peeled.
Check out the new site and let us know what you think at info@gibedigital.com
Visit Moustachemedia.com in IE, they don't let you view their site, I bet a lot of their potential clients use IE and they just turn them away, seems like they don't want the business. Although I use and recommend Firefox, I develop sites that work in IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome,
Maybe they can't be bothered to do any cross browser testing, or perhaps they don't have the ability to get the sites they write to look good in IE, it would certainly put me off using them.
Well this is my new version of the site, I've updated my portfolio (finally) and implemented the blog in ASP.NET MVC as well as freshening up the design. I'm putting some finishing touches up over the next few days, I had to switch over before I was completely happy for a variety of reasons.
Let me know what you think.
Have just seen the keynote speech for Remix08. The first two thirds of the speech was about Microsoft and developers in general changing to more Apple like culture of design within products. It was an interesting talk although coming from a web agency background the design up front principals are very much ingrained in the web. Moving to web and then desktop applications, I guess it'll be a lot less prevalent and probably an afterthought.
The second 1/3 was more what I'd been expecting and a lot more product and technology based. Things that piqued my interest:
More to follow..
I've just put this site live, If we get 16,000 names to sign this petition (just over 5% of the voting population of the city of Bristol) then the city will have the opportunity to take part in a referendum on whether Bristol should have a directly elected and publically accountable mayor.
So go sign up!
Check out our new reminder service www.thebirthdaybrain.com. It's simple to use and best of all it's free, sign yourself up and invite your friends and never get in trouble for forgetting someones birthday again.
I've been creating a couple of improved ASP.NET controls such as a label which actually renders as a label with a for attribute which will point at the right control after ASP.NET has mangled the ids.
Turns out to be fairly difficult to find information about just using the literal content of a User Control, but simple to implement. Just add the ParseChildren attribute to your User Control's class and set it to true and supply the name of the field it should put any literal content into.
e.g. [ParseChildren(true,"Text")]
Which will populate the Text attribute with the inner html of the user control.
The new grobag.com site went live today.
The biggest revelation when developing this site was when a friend recommended trying JQuery. This makes javascript so much easier and stops you having to worry about getting your scripts to run cross browser. The baby sleeping bags page makes use of the library and the built in AJAX facilities provided. Other than that, it's a fairly standard content managed site using reddot and it's new navigation manager functionality.
Anyway, check it out and let me know what you think.
© Steve Temple 2009