I got curious today as to the root meaning of the word technology and I stumbled onto this interesting definition:
“technology – the practical application of knowledge;”
LearnThat.org
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There are a number of reasons you might want to get the current path. For example, you might chose to create a menu system that compares the current path against a list of paths that are available and use that to add the “current” class so you could indicate which page you were currently on.
This current path is located inside the request.env['REQUEST_PATH'] property. A shortcut to this property is request.path.
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If you have a link or a button on a website and it’s not easy to find, it might as well not even be on the page because to the visitor, it practically doesn’t exist. Take the “YouTube Partnership Program: Welcome” page from YouTube:
It explains to me that one of my videos has become popular (a modest 3,000 views) and that I can sign up for revenue sharing. Great. I’ve always to learn more about the process that is involved. It tells me all the steps and says “Let’s get started …”. Sweet… let’s do it. Wait, how do I get started? I re-read the instructions in-case I missed something. Nop, I didn’t miss anything. Right as soon as I was about to say “forget about it” (in New York style, mind you), I saw something in the corner of my eye. It’s a link that says “Next Page >” in the bottom right corner, right above the footer links. Let’s review where my eye was expecting it and where it was:
Why would they have it so far from where you’d expect the link? Did they just not think about it? Do they want to discourage revenue sharing?
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If you’re going to be doing internet marketing, you owe yourself to watch the following Mixergy interview of Chance Barnett. It’s just one of the many incredibly value videos on Mixergy. I highly recommend becoming a member.
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About 21 hours ago, I read Carlos Taborda’s blog post on how they were able to increase their conversion rates by 45% through testing and optimizing their design/content. The results were impressive. The key changes they made were:
- Remove navigation bar. The idea was to limit the users options. They had to either either click to see Plans & Pricing or view the features.
- Red call to action button.
- Features instead of Screenshot.
- Big Letters
- No Pricing in front-page
- Some better description text, more concise, bullets, etc.
Of the above, the one that I hadn’t tested was removing the navigation menu on our home page. I’ve tested removing it on our consultation form and it works great but I hadn’t tested it on the home page. Next task: Test!
Test Overview
Using Visual Website Optimizer, it was pretty easy to get a test setup and running.
Here’s the header for control:
Here’s the header for the variant:
I setup 4 conversion goals:
- Viewed Pricing Page
- Viewed Consultation Page
- Became Lead
- Engagement (inverse of bounce rate)
Results
After a few hundred people viewed the test, here are the results as compared with the control which was website with menu on home page:
- Viewed Pricing Page: -15.57%
- Viewed Consultation Page: +3.19%
- Became Lead: +1.1%
- Engagement: -49.73%
Conclusion
As you can see from the data above, the engagement rate is way way down. Consultation page views and Lead conversion is up slightly but it’s not worth the huge gigantic drop in engagement on the website.
This quick test doesn’t prove that you must have a menu on your website. It simply means that you should take everyone’s advice with a grain of salt and test everything you change on your site because as they often say in weight loss commercials, “Results May Vary!!”
PS: I know the sample size is small but the difference is so significant that a reasonable conclusion can be drawn on which variation will be a better performer.
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I got the following email from a client of mine a few minutes ago:
What is the recommended practice for the WordPress updates? Should I be installing them as they become available?
This is a great question and below is my general recommendation:
- Small point upgrades (3.0 to 3.0.1 to 3.0.2, etc) should be applied almost immediately. They usually don’t break anything and are security/bug patches.
- For medium point upgrades (3.0.x to 3.1 to 3.2), themes and plugins might have conflicts. I usually like to do these immediately but make sure to have a backup that you can revert to almost immediately if something breaks.
- For full version upgrades, 3.x to 4.0, upgrade should be done relatively soon. I usually like to wait for some reports to come out giving a green light or a red light. Sometimes it’s wise to wait for the x.0.1 or x.0.2 patches to upgrade. Historically speaking, full version upgrades have a tendency to break plugins and/or themes so it’s wise to be 100% sure you have a backup copy of your site before upgrading.
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When you’re optimizing your website, you need to keep in mind that if your audience changes, your results are mostly likely invalidated and you should re-test.
An example of this is our link to the pricing/lead generation page in our main navigation menu. A few months ago, we ran a test that tested various language for that link (ex. Pricing, Pricing Info, Free Price Quote, Free Pricing). The test ran for a month and had a significant amount of visitors. At the end of that test, “Free Price Quote” was a clear winner converting 60% more than the control (which was “Pricing”) so that’s what we ran with. Later, we tested the button on our home page with similar wording variations. Same result as expected.
About a month ago, we acquired a few companies/websites and have been very active on the marketing front. This has increased our traffic significantly. One thing I noticed was that our numbers had not held up after the increase in traffic and the likely cause was that our mix of website visitors has changed so we decided to retest the language for our pricing/lead-gen page.
The new test is currently running but we’ve already gotten a significant amount of visitors to be able to trust the data. With our new mix of visitors, “Pricing” is actually converting about 70% more than “Free Price Quote” and has about the same bounce rate. I’m going to continue running the test for the next month to make sure it holds.
PS: I’m using Visual Website Optimizer to run the tests. A full review is coming soon.
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Google has a reputation for building amazing products and hiring the smartest nerds around. However, you might be surprised to find out that most of the products & services is widely known for were actually companies Google bought and integrated. The graphic below visually shows details of the companies Google has acquired.
Some of these acquisitions have been very strategically important while others haven’t really been used too well. The real lesson to take away from this post is that you can grow exponentially through acquisition if you do the work to integrate and own the purchased company/products. We’ve made some acquisitions recently and are hard at work integrating. I hope to share them with you soon.
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For the last 2 weeks, I’ve had some family members over from New Zealand. My uncle had brought his Sony VAIO laptop that was a few years old that had grown painfully slow. The main problem it had was that it had almost no hard drive space left.
The first task was to figure out where all the space had gone. This can be a very time consuming task if you do it manually.
Fortunately, there’s a fantastic free software for windows called WinDirStat that will analyze your hard drive, identify where all your space is being used and show it to you with a breakdown by hard drive.
WinDirStat
To download it, visit http://windirstat.info
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Volcanic has acquired the digital assets of SamK.ca & 85ideas.com. We’re going to continue supporting the users of these themes and will soon be announcing some exciting improvements to the themes, as part of a larger, more exciting announcement.
I’d like to welcome Sam, who will be working with us to improve the themes, support the users and grow our themes library. I’ve used his Pixel themes in the past because of it’s unique look and we’re excited about having his talent as part of our resources.
Melvin Ram, CEO
Volcanic Web Design Company
Message from Sam:
Hi everybody
Over the past few years, I’ve received a lot of questions about ways to enhance, customize and personalize the WordPress themes that I have been distributing. I’ve been thinking of ways to do so, and I think I’ve finally found a solution that will make everybody happy.If you like the themes that I’ve been distributing, you’re going to love this.
In the last few months, I’ve been chatting a lot with Melvin Ram of Volcanic Web Design Company. Melvin has been working with WordPress for a while now (you might know Volcanic better for the WordPress backup plugin they released) and is now preparing something very interesting concerning WordPress themes. Something that should make the WordPress community blissfully happy.I will be joining Volcanic in this adventure.
The themes available on samk.ca and 85ideas.com will very shortly be hosted on Volcanic’s website, where we will proceed with their development and enhancement.What does this mean?
For users, it means that within a few weeks/months, the themes will have an overhaul. More options, better ways to customize them etc. More of everything! For me, it means that I’ll be working together with Melvin in doing so. For the themes and domains, it means that their copyrights and ownership are now part of Volcanic.We will therefore proceed to redirecting the domains to Volcanic, starting August 2nd, 2010
See you on the other side!
Sam
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