Tag Archives: website

Updating the PerfectTablePlan website

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!

Consulting testimonial: Reserviz

Working as a micro-ISV needs lots of different skills, but no-one can have all of them. When you’re developing a software product for your independent venture, it’s easy to lose sight of some issues, just because there are so many of them to cover, and so few hours in a day. I realised that to help me re-focus and prioritise the key tasks after the code was complete needed the catalyst of a fresh pair of eyes, to verify or change the plans I had. Simply chatting to a knowledgeable professional made all the difference to perspective and priorities. I was expecting that from Andy Brice, as I’d read about his work with other micro-ISVs. What I wasn’t expecting was his breadth of business knowledge as well as his technical knowledge. Being able to discuss business objectives, markets, pricing, promotion as well as SEO and coding was a great punctuation point in the development of the Reserviz online service, and it helped me develop a much more focussed set of priorities to complete the initial launch period. Don’t expect from Andy a glib confirmation that everything you’ve done is fine – he’ll give you an honest assessment, and then help you work out a plan. Think of Andy as the Swiss Army Knife you need in your toolbox!

Mike Gorman, www.Reserviz.com

I have been doing some consulting for Mike Gorman of Quartile Software on Reserviz. Reserviz is an online service for booking rooms, people and other resources. I have primarily been helping Mike with positioning (deciding which vertical markets to focus on), online marketing (including SEO and Google Adwords) and testing the usability of the website. It was a slight departure for me, as most of my experience is with desktop apps. But it just proved that the vast majority of what is true for the marketing and usability of desktop apps also applies to web apps.

I think Reserviz has a very attractive website with a nice balance between simplicity and flexibility. If you know anyone who is still using a tatty old appointment book? Tell them to checkout Reserviz for simple online appointment and resource booking (first month free!).

Getting website feedback with Kampyle

kampyle Getting good feedback from customers and prospective customers is essential to any business. I think I already do quite a good job of getting feedback from paying customers. But what about visitors who click around my site for a few minutes and then leave, never to return? I would love to know why they didn’t buy. This sort of feedback is much harder to come by, so I was interested to read about Kampyle in the article 14 free tools that reveal why people abandon your website.

Kampyle adds a clickable image to a designated corner of your webpage. If a user clicks on this image they are shown a simple (and customisable) feedback form. Any feedback is collected by Kampyle and presented through a dashboard on their website. All you have to do is register, customise your feedback form and add some javascript inside the <head> and <body> tags of each page. Best of all, the service is free. You can see it in action on Kampyle’s own website.

Click the floating image in the bottom-right corner to show the feeback form

Leave feedback

You can also have Kampyle pop-up a survey question for a given percentage of users as they leave your site. I find such surveys annoying and never fill them in, so I haven’t felt inclined to try this yet.

Kampyle sounds great. Users have a simple way to supply feedback which doesn’t distract them from my key goal (buying my software). Sadly, very few visitors actually supplied feedback through Kampyle. I ran it for a month on some of the highest traffic pages on my Perfect Table Plan site and got a grand total of 4 comments from 3 visitors. Only two of these comments had any really useful feedback and both were from a single paying customer who probably would have emailed support anyway. I don’t feel the feedback justified the ‘cost’, in terms of the potential distraction of visitors and another potential failure mode for my website. Consequently I am now only running Kampyle on a couple of peripheral pages. Maybe the results would be better for different types of site. It only takes 10 minutes of so to set up, so it might be worth a try.