Designing Above the Fold: Does it Matter?

Above the fold design can give you up to a 5% lift, but only if you don’t bend other quality design principles. Below the fold, size doesn’t matter — users will scroll if they are engaged. A scrolling page with clear messaging is better than “squeezing” content above the fold.

Managing Downtime to Avoid Customer Disappointments

Downtime and outages are two things that — if planned for — can make or break a customer’s respect for your company. I was on the Blockbuster site yesterday, and behold the message I got — a generic Weblogic server error. Did this give me confidence in Blockbuster’s ability to manage my account and provide the service I’m paying for? Hardly.

Using Persuasion to Avoid Pogo-Sticking Customers

Retailers working to optimize their shopping cart process are often focused on how many visitors abandon their shopping carts. Bryan Eisenberg argues in a nice article on optimizing customer experience that persuasion, not shopping cart abandonment, is the real issue.

2007 Web Analytics Shootout

Not sure which web analytics package is best for you? Stone Temple Consulting has published a 55-page 2007 Web Analytics Shootout, the results of a nine-month study of seven top Web analytics packages on four different web sites.

Web Usability at Convertup.com

Came across this very nicely done site: Convertup.com. The founder of this site (make sure to subscribe to his ConvertUp web usability blog — the articles are great) has numerous tips about web usability testing. ConvertUp publishes articles and offers services to help people increase their site’s conversion rate by offering a usability testing […]

Head For The Top

And now for something completely different.
www.headforthetop.com is a new concept — a web site has been launched which puts a whole new angle on advertisement web sites. The ads actually compete for the prime spot on the page, right in front of the viewers eyes by playing Rock, Paper and Scissors.
Text or Image based adverts […]

Heat Map Tracking Tools

The SEOmoz Blog points out two heat map tracking software solutions.
CrazyEgg (I think Rand already talked about it), which is simple, easy to use and cost between 0,33$ - 0,80$ / 1 000 visits. I am not sure how deep the metrics are behind it. Has any of you tried it? It is worth it?
[…]

Intellicontact and Other Email Tools

Need to evaluate best-of-breed email marketing tools? For low to mid-range deployments, here are three good contenders to evaluate:

http://www.intellicontact.com
http://www.verticalresponse.com
http://www.constantcontact.com

Four seconds till abandonment

The research by Akamai reveals online users are less patient than ever. If a website takes longer than four seconds to load, users are likely to abandon it. 75% of those users would not return to websites that took more than four seconds to load. Read more
Is your page too ‘heavy’ and need help […]

Increasing Comments Traffic

Want to increase comments on your web site article? Try making the feedback option more prominent. Take a look at how ZDNet formats their comments button (on the left below):

Also note they add this to the top of the article page. See it in action at ZDNet.