Tag: ui

I have been asked to redevelop a website as it is not being as effective at creating leads or conversions to the level that they would like. In this post I discuss 5 points of research on how to create great website menu bars.

1. Less me and more you

In life no one likes someone who talks about themselves, everyone is more interested in their own life. In their achievements & in their problems and drawing your visitors attention should start by thinking what your customers want from your site? The old rule when websites where first made was to always put Home at the start so its easy to locate & then the About Link..this has changed. I would now recommend putting the About section near the end of the menu as people are less interested in you and your background and more interested in what you can do for them!

2. NO Services Tab

What is the point in a services tab? Saying you have services is all very good but it isn’t specific enough, how is anyone going to know what you can provide them without visit that specific page? It isn’t just to be more specific but you must also reenforce your marketing message to the visitor. BE creative with your choice of words not just your images.

3. Contact

The contact feature may be considered to be one of the most important feature of any website so making sure it is clear and easily accessible at all times. Why not even have a button that is always on screen to ask for an instant quote for your product? One step further, if you have the team available have a live chat feature to give your potential leads more options for making an enquiry.

Look at my website for a simple example. My contact page is always available ( top right corner) to you no matter where you are on the site.

4. Lets be Social

Being social is very important in the modern world. Being an active participant on social media sites shows you are a company that stays in touch with the latest technology, value your customers current opinions and keep abreast of what is happening amongst your industry. I usually keep the social media icons in the footer of a website but ocassionlly in a sidebar. Some websites include it in their menu for easy access. Any of these three options are fine.

5. Blog all about it

So you have a home page, about page, “something” other than services tab & a contact tab but do you blog? What is a blog? Well you are reading a blog right now! Why blog? Well for three main reasons : –

• SEO – improves your search engine ranking
• Expertise – shows you know what you are talking about
• Socialise – it gives you something to tweet about regularly and create conversation
• Build a fan base – those who are interested in what you are will begin to communicate with you
• Create leads and opportunity – blogging sometimes leads to being offered to guest blog on other websites as well as opportunities for contracts, job offers & networking.

Don’t forget to create an RSS Feed for your regular fans ( wordpress creates this automatically as it was developed for blogging purposes just use www.yourdomain.com/feed or alternatively set up a feedburner account so you can see exactly how many fans you currently have subscribed to your account! ).

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Have you got some more ideas about what works well on website menus? Please share this post with your social circle using the buttons below and discuss the article in the comment box below.

UI or user interface is getting a much larger attention than ever before. Getting your webpages just right for your users is really important but quite a difficult task when you are designing something in the way you think looks best.Google Analytics offers a way for you to test different layouts for particular pages and then find out which pages are most likely to complete conversions than others. I want to show you in this post how you can also do this to improve your websites UI.

Step 1: Create a Google Analytics Account

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If you haven’t already the first thing you need to do is create a google analytics account. This is a totally free thing to do and it will allow you to study your website, what is working, how users navigate your site, what pages are most used and which pages aren’t so successful amongst many other things. It is well worth your time and I am sure many of you already have this great feature on your site. If you don’t then what are you waiting for? Simply follow the instructions that google provides and sign up right away! ( If you need any help or guidance please leave a comment below).

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Setting Goals

Goals are a versatile way to measure how well your site or app fulfills your objectives. You can set up individual Goals to track discrete actions, such as transactions with a minimum purchase amount or the amount of time spent on a screen.

1.Firstly on the main dashboard of analytics press conversions and a drop down list will appear like in the image above. Once about press goals > overview.

2. You will then be given a page like that below. Put in the url of the page you are wanting to set up an experiment in the blank box.

3.You can set up a goal for many things. How about making sure take the action of arriving on a particular page that will lead to a purchase? Use the url destination radio button. Or what if you just want people to stay longer on a page to make sure they read the information you are providing? Then choose Visit duration. It is pretty self explanatory. Once you have made your selection of which goal radio you will be given another form to fill in. For this example i am seeing how many people will arrive at my blog from the home page so using URL destination (See image below).

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4. Once you are happy with everything press save.

5. Your Goal is now active.

Step 3:  Access the Experiments Feature

With our goal set up, we can now start to create experiments in google analytics to determine which of our pages will perform the best in terms of visiting the blog from the homepage.
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1.Under the ‘Content’ section of the main left menu, select ‘Experiments’.

2. You will need to make several variations of your webpage that you want to improve conversions on ( i recommend at least 3 ) in order to have a more meaningful test. Whatever CMS you are using you just need to create more pages and publish them in order for google analytics to be able to find those pages you want to test the original to.

3. Watch this video from google and it will guide you through the rest of the setup.

4. Once you have completed this stage it just a matter of time waiting for visitors to come and try out your new page.
5. Google Analytics will give you a tone of results and a percentage of what the likely hood is that your new designs will outperform the other or not.

Step 8: Arriving at a Winner

As mentioned in the previous step it is just waiting for enough visitors to use the page to arrive at a winner. Whether it takes three days or three weeks to arrive at a conclusion, you can be confident beyond reasonable doubt that the winner of the experiment will indeed be the best performer in terms of the goal that is being measured.

Step 9: We Have a Winner, What Now?

Depending how confident you are that one of your new design will outperform your original design in terms of the conversion set then you can replace that page or not.

Also, you need to consider all variables that may have effected the experiment. How many people visited the original design compared to the other design samples. Do the visitors have the same tastes in design or not? As you can see it is important to analysis the data and not just take it at face value.
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If you need any help with your experiment don’t hesitate to contact me and I will see what I can do to help you, best of luck in improving your UI.