css | Successful Software

I created the website for PerfectTablePlan back in 2005, using a dreadfully buggy piece of software called NetObjects Fusion (NOF). The sorry story of why I ended up using NOF is told here.

Until recently the front page looked like this.

I had done a fair amount of A/B test tweaking and it converted visitors to downloads and sales relatively well compared to other downloadable product websites. But it had that ‘designed by a programmer’ look and it wasn’t responsive, so it didn’t work on well on mobile devices. My software only runs on Windows and Mac, but I still want to appear in mobile searches. The HTML generated by NOF was also pretty horrible. Frankly, I was a bit embarrassed by it when I looked at websites for other products. I kept on meaning to update it, but there was always something more urgent or (to be honest) more interesting to do. I finally bit the bullet and had it redesigned in 2015. The front page now looks like this:

The process was:

I wrote a specification for the new design.
I ran a 99Designs.com competition to design a new home page based on the spec.
I selected the winning designer and paid them to design 3 additional pages in the same style.
I paid pixelcrayons.com to code up the 4 pages in responsive CSS/HTML.
I poured all the old content into the new design. Being careful to maintain the existing page names, titles, text and images etc, so as not to lose existing organic traffic.

The whole process didn’t cost a great deal (somewhere around $2k), but it took quite a lot of my time, spread over 5 months. Especially the final step. This wasn’t helped by the size (some 128 pages were converted) and general cruftiness of the old website, and my lack of knowledge of CSS and responsive design.

I didn’t want to be locked in to a CMS, so I used Mac static website generator Hammer4Mac to generate the HTML. It goes without saying that I wrote a program to help me pull all the content out of the old website and into Hammer4Mac! While Hammer4Mac isn’t without flaws, I found it a vast improvement over NOF and the new website is now much easier to update and maintain than the old one.

The new website went live on 16-Dec-2015.

So how much difference did the redesign make? Here are the changes based on comparing 25 weeks of data before the change and 25 weeks of data after the change:

bounce rate	+1.5%
time on page	+16.0%
traffic	+6.5%
desktop traffic	-2.2%
mobile & tablet traffic	+40.0%
completed installs	+1.4%
sales transactions	+11.4%
total sales value	+21.8%
visit to sale conversion ratio	+4.6%
average order value	+9.4%

The increase in mobile traffic as a proportion of total traffic is pretty clear from analytics (the dip in December is seasonal):

I believe a 21.8% improvement in sales is a lot more than I would have got by spending the same amount of time and money improving the product itself, which is pretty mature after 11 years of work.

Overall it looks pretty positive. But, as analytics data is fairly dirty (e.g. due to analytics spam) and I didn’t run a split test, I can’t definitely say that the changes above were due to the website changes. I wasn’t able to compare all the above data with the same time period for the previous year due to some missing analytics data. But the sales data for 25 weeks before and after 16-Dec in the previous year was:

sales transactions	-9.9%
total sales value	-2.7%
average order value	+8.1%

Which implies that the sales changes are unlikely to be due to seasonal factors.

Best of all, I never have to use NetObjects Fusion again!

I am looking to outsource some self-contained programming tasks in areas that I don’t have expertise in. I am hoping that someone reading this blog might be able to help (or know someone that can) so I don’t have to go through outsourcing sites. These are the two skills sets I am currently looking for:

Javascript/CSS/HTML – To write a single page web app. This will have a relatively simple UI displaying data read from XML. The app will need to work on a wide range of browsers and devices. Ideally you should also have some web design skills, but this isn’t essential.
C++/Qt 4/OpenGL – To write a relatively simple 3D visualization model that runs on Windows and Mac. This will involve populating a 3D space with specified shapes and allowing simple movement around it.

Details:

I am expecting that I will need 2 different people, but it is possible there might be someone out there with experience in both.
These are small projects (probably less than 2 weeks for task 1 and less than 1 week for task 2). But they might lead on to more work in future.
Time scales are reasonably relaxed. Ideally I would like the work to be finished by the end of September.
You can be based anywhere in the world, but must be able to communicate in English (written and spoken).
Full copyright to the work will pass to my company on full payment.
Obviously cost is an issue. If I have 2 promising candidates, I am likely to pick the cheaper one.

If you are interested in doing either of these tasks please email me ( andy at oryxdigital.com ) before the end of Friday 26th August with subject “programming work” and a brief outline of:

Which of the 2 tasks you are interested in.
Your relevant experience. Ideally including details of related projects completed.
Your daily rate in Pounds Sterlings or US dollars.

I will send detailed specs to a shortlist of the best candidates. The work will be awarded on the basis of fixed price bids against the spec. Please don’t apply unless you have relevant experience – if I wanted a programmer without experience in these areas I could do it myself. ;0)