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Being Christmas and nearly the end of the year already (wow, 2008 flew by…) I thought I would round up some great blog posts from website optimization experts from around the web that will help you improve and optimize your website. There are some great minds out there that you can learn from - I know I have! So, here are my favorite website optimization blog posts of 2008…

1: The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist for the Home Page
Too many homepages are poorly optimized, which is a terrible thing considering its often a visitors first impression of a website. Stoney deGeyter wrote a really great checklist full of ideas for helping to improving home page. A must read.

2: 25 Web Form Optimization Tips
Badly designed forms can often be a major cause of poorly optimized websites. Justin Palmer discusses some great tips to help reduce these problems.

3: Speed Up Your Website
Even thought high speed internet connections are now very common, many websites still suffer from slow performance issues - often driving your website visitors away. Alex Cohen discusses some great ways to help speed up your site.

4: Experiment or Die. Five Reasons and Awesome Testing Ideas
Testing plays such a key part in the optimization of any website. The analytics guru himself, Avinash Kaushik, gives some great advice on why you should test, and offers some great testing ideas.

5: Check Your Site Usability With These Fun Tools
Bad website usability plays a major factor in a badly optimized website. But just how can you find out how good your website usability is? Ann Smarty wrote a great revealing some cool tools to help you find how usable your website is…

6: 5 Rules for Quality Landing Page Design
Billy at Widemile discusses some more usual, great practices for helping to improve and optimize your landing pages. Very revealing!

7:  The Value of a Unique Value Proposition
If you offer no good reason for a visitor to use your website rather than a competitors,  then it really doesn’t matter how good your website is. Thats why its essential to develop a unique value proposition to help optimize your website.

8: 17 Rules for Successful Ecommerce Sites
There are many, many different ways to help improve ecommerce websites and therefore increase your sales revenue. SEOmoz reveals 17 great rules!

9: Losing Customers at the Register: 12 Checkout Blunders
A surefire way to lose a website visitor before making a sale is by having a poorly optimized shopping cart. Here are 12 common mistakes you should avoid.

10: 7 Ways to Measure and Improve Your Website
Alex Cohen gives some unique perspective on not just improving your website, but how to go about measuring your website most effectively.

So there we have it - after reading these 10 great blog posts from website experts, you should be in much better shape to start optimizing your website!

Oh, and Happy Christmas to everyone and have a truly optimized New Year!

Believe it or not, it’s not just all about how cool your website looks, and how good your product is. One of the biggest factors that determine whether your website converts its visitors is simple: the words you use as links and calls to action.

I have seen my fair share of website words over my 10 years of working online, but I still see some truly shocking words on websites that don’t help convert visitors or engage them in any way whatsoever.

In particular, there are two words on the internet that really make me cringe, and do absolutely NOTHING for the user website experience or improving all important conversion rates. Continue Reading »

If you are a huge online shopper just like me, you may have noticed the abundance of online stores that are now offering some kind of free shipping. It all really started with Amazon.com a few years back.

I have always been curious to know what the actual impact of offering free shipping is on increasing sales for these stores (and on their profits), and what happens if online stores don’t match their competitors free shipping. Luckily, someone else was thinking this very same thing - so much so that they decided to write a free ebook exploring free shipping!

So, let me introduce the author and expert on this matter - Luke Knowles - he is the founder of FreeShipping.org (which has great free shipping offers too). He has just launched this free ebook called ‘The Free Shipping eBook’, and its packed with great useful information that will help an online store owner not just decide whether to offer free shipping, but what kind of free shipping to offer, and how to do it with most impact.

Luke gives a nice introduction - but my favorite sections are the market research on this subject and the value of free shipping. His points really help hammer home how important it now is to offer some kind of free shipping online. Here are some great stats that really rang home for me:

“78% of online customers said prohibitive costs of shipping discouraged them from online purchases”. (Source: E-tailing Group, 2008)

“75% of people prefer to shop with online retailers that offer free shipping, compared to 61% in 2007″. (Source: Forrester Research, 2008)

Luke also walks you through all the different options and benefits for types of free shipping - you don’t just have to offer free shipping on orders over $25 like Amazon.com does. There are plenty of great other ideas like free shipping on select items or free shipping by location. He also does a great job discussing tips to emphasize the free shipping offer, like urgency and exclusivity.

It really helped me understand the benefits to offering free shipping, and how to do it with the most impact. I won’t reveal any further - head over to his website, grab a copy of his great ebook and read the rest yourself. Great job Luke!

So it’s not just Black Friday coming up soon for big sales. Cyber Monday is coming up too. Heard of that yet? It’s the biggest online shopping day of the year - its the Monday after Thanksgiving. But it’s not all just about competing on lowest price that attracts the most online sales, like most online stores rely on on Cyber Monday to attract more sales. There are some relatively simple things you can do to your ecommerce website to help increase sales without decreasing your prices - not just on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but all year round! So here is a list of 7 things you can do to your website to increase sales without lowering your prices… Continue Reading »

As some of you may have seen already, last Thursday I changed the name of this blog and created a logo for it. Why did I do that? Well for 2 main reasons:

1. The ‘Ramblings’ part of my blog name didn’t really mean anything to anyone. It was fun for a while when this blog didn’t have a clear focus, but it doesn’t really describe what my blog is about.
2. Recently, I have been focusing more on the art of website optimization (including my recent certification in this field last week), and not focusing just on web analytics.

So, I thought what better way to improve my blog by describing what I love to do. And thats website optimization. So ’Rich Page: Website Optimizer’ was born last week. I would love to know what you all think of the new name. And don’t worry, the URL is staying the same. My feeds and email updates now reflect this new blog name too. And yes, I will still continue to discuss website analytics in this blog, as it goes hand in hand with effective website optimization.

I often get a lot of people ask what website optimization is. So, I thought I would give my very own definition of website optimization (and yes, its much more than search engine optimization!):

The art of creating and continuously improving websites to optimize the visitor experience and conversion rates, resulting in high visitor satisfaction and high repeat visit rates.

So there we have it - look for more focus on website optimization (and services coming soon). I would love to hear what you all think of my new blog name too!

Earlier this week I had the great pleasure to attend a Landing Page Optimization Workshop in sunny Santa Monica. Hosted by MarketingSherpa and MarketingExperiments.com, not only did I get the joy of getting certified by passing their test, but it really opened my eyes up to the bigger picture of designing web pages that efficiently converts it’s visitors. Being a web analyst that’s so involved in bounce rates, it was refreshing for me to see and use a different angle based on actual theory. And what were the most important elements that I found very revealing? Continue Reading »

It seems like forever ago that I first started learning HTML (back in ‘96 I created a Doors fan site!) Since then, I have been involved with many websites, from startups to big media companies. I have even worked as an online marketing manager before. And believe me, over the years I’ve seen many companies waste away money on poor pay-per-click campaigns, bad email marketing, and pitiful banner advertising. And I still see this wasteful online marketing happening all the time!

Only fairly recently did I come to a big realization about online marketing and how wasteful it is. Some might call it an ‘e-piphany’…. Continue Reading »

While you can get some great information about website optimization from blogs, and pick up some great ideas for helping to improve your websites and their visitors experience (like from Future Now), its still no real substitute for some in-depth reading and learning.

Over the last few months I have finally got some time to read some excellent website optimization books, and thought I would do a recap on the best ones out there. Anyone interested in trying to help improve websites should read these great books as soon as possible… so without further ado… Continue Reading »

You would think that given well over 10 years of Internet and the amount of websites that have come and gone over this time (and there are some great website disasters over the years), that websites would be of a higher quality than ever before. Sadly, that is still not the case - there are just as many bad websites out there than ever before. So, following in this theme of bad websites, I thought I would put together 5 quick steps to help you try and build a bad website that your visitors will be sure to not come back to.

I’m sure a few of these will ring angst-riden bells with many of you who work for internet companies! Let’s get started… Continue Reading »

There are literally millions of blogs online now, and many of them need help improving (and yes, yours probably does too). Luckily, there are many simple tools and plugins available that can be used to help improve blogs and help satifsy their visitors better. Therefore, in continuation of my recent ProBlogger guest post ‘5 Way to Improve your Blog to Gain More Repeat Visits’, I decided to create a long list of tools and wordpress plugins that will help improve your blog - lets get started… Continue Reading »