Archive for June, 2006

10 great tips for improving conversions from I Love Jack Daniels

Today Google Checkout launched. Sadly not in the UK.

Andy Budd asks us to name 3 Things You Wish Clients Knew About the Web

In my time, I’ve read quite a few computing text books. On my degree course, I read lots of awful books on boring subject matter like 3D computer graphics and IT management strategies, and in my spare time I’ve read a lot of interesting books based around web design/development and all that entails. This book is my favourite so far. Read the rest of this entry »

Google Blogoscoped details 9 Ways to Misunderstand Web Standards very well.

Over at Clagnut, a way to add line breaks to tooltips has been unearthed.

Google Analytics is awesome and it’s free so it’s double-awesome. The things that can be measured include the drop-off rates for your checkout process, revenue by source (e.g. which website has sent you the most money).

Recently at JJB I’ve been taking it a step further by using GA to analyse the problems people are having with our site.

The first measurement I’ve added this week, checks how many people try to add an item to their shopping basket when the product size is out of stock. For this to make sense, you have to realise that our website has a select menu on the product details page where the user selects their desired size and if that size is in stock the add basket button becomes visible as does the select quantity option. When stock is not present the user is told so.

The second and more important measurement, from a usability point of view, is the counting and aggregation of the error messages the users on our website get. To be honest, this information isn’t giving me too big an insight as I am aware of a lot of the problems (thanks to Usability Testing with real people) but they do add weight to my suggestions to change the site in places.

How it’s done

Simply add this code to your page:

This will produce a folder in your content drilldown option in GA called error. N.B. For this to work your errors must be set up in an array so you’d call the above script multiple times in a loop or have multiple calls to the urchinTracker() JavaScript function for each error message otherwise, the data will be difficult to aggregate and therefore read.

It’s still early days for this data but hopefully, it will not only highlight issues I’m aware of but issues that I’m not and it goes to show how you can use Google Analytics to be even more valuable than it already is.

Thinking of starting an Adwords campaign? Read the 10 worst Adword campaign mistakes first.

In HTML emails: taming the beast David Greiner says some very useful things about HTML email design.

Welcome to a new blog, img is everything. This is the personal website of me, UK web designer/developer Phil Thompson. Currently, I live in Manchester and work in Wigan for JJB Sports, doing all the sorts of tasks I’ll hopefully be preaching about on this website.

The previous incarnation of a Phil Thompson blog existed at www.doubleonegative.com, where I blogged from June 2004 to November 2005. That blog’s purpose was to document my rise from lowly student to a fully-fledged Web Designer, as that process seems to have bloomed it’s necessary to move the blog away from that location to here. Read the rest of this entry »

Disabled Football Fans on losing side, whatever England’s fate according to a study by Ability Net