joey101.net

Arctic Paint and SEOjo light

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 07:00:00 -0000

Has it really been almost seven months since my last post? How time flies.

A lot has been happening. For starters I created a new site for all my game development endeavors called Arctic Paint.

Next up is SEOjo light! It's a small desktop program I wrote to help with on-page SEO. Try it out and if you have any feedback be sure to let me know!

Then there are a few more cool things coming up that I hope to be announcing soon.

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Inkscape

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 08:00:00 -0000

I first tried Inkscape back in 2004 recently after it made it's first release. Within minuets I had figured out the interface and what all the tools did. To my point; it was (and still is) very user friendly.

It was my first time seeing the world of SVG and I didn't realize what cool stuff could be done with it. Over time I toyed with it and figuring out what all the path operations did and began learning a few of the tricks.

I started out just making small web graphics and icons. Several months ago I found out that it was also great for making mockups for website designs. Its tools almost seemed to be made for the job; from the text tool and the guidelines to the elegant color system.

And then I bought a waccom drawing tablet and guess what? Inkscape seemed to be made just for it! I've always had an interest in making comics - and Inkscape is perfect for it! (Especially with the upcoming version with flood fill) Everything just behaves like you would expect it to.

It's amazing that one piece of software can be used for so many things yet be so simple to use. But its "amazing" factor doesn't stop there, besides the awing speed that Inkscape is being developed and improved, it runs fast! All transformations are rendered instantly - period - and my computer isn't even all that fast. You get top quality rendering all the time. (ok, so it does get a little slow with a lot of blurring but you can't expect miracles)

Inkscape is one of the more amazing pieces of open source software I've used. Right up there with Blender and KDE. Heck, I like it far more than Adobe's Illustrator! I tried it out a month or two ago and it ran incredibly slow (it loaded very slow too), the interface was confusing and the drawing tool looked ugly. I know really neat stuff can be made with it but I don't want to have to read a 50 page manual to learn how to.

Anyway, Inkscape is a very impressive piece of software and definitely worth a look if you haven't already.

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Decrease Your Bounce Rate

Tue, 27 Nov 2007 08:00:00 -0000

Decreasing the bounce rate on your e-comrice website (or on any website) can be difficult, but it's worth it. A bounce is a user who lands on your page and leaves without any further browsing. The higher the bounce rate, the less sales you get per visitor. That can mean the loss of lots of money!

On the e-store I work with about 4% of visitors that don't bounce turn into a $40 sale. So that means that if 60% of the visitors bounce, only 1.6% of total visitors will make a sale. While if I manage to lower the bounce rate to 30%, 2.8% of my total visitors will make a sale. So say for example I get 300 visits a day; at the 60% bounce rate I would make $192 a day, but at the 30% bounce rate I would make $336 a day! That's a $144 per day difference for decreasing your bounce rate by just 30%! At 1000 visitors a day the difference would be $480, and it keeps on going.

So as you can see, it can be a matter of lots of money to decrease your bounce rate even by a little. In this article I'll show you the steps I took to decrease my bounce rate by a decent amount. It took three homepage redesigns and a couple of revisions of each but I did it! I haven't gotten to 300 visitors a day yet though... especially not since the shop got destroyed by a tornado [1].

Homepage design #1

Note: I wasn't able to get screenshots of these two first designs. Sorry about that; these rough sketches will have to do.

One of the keys to keeping your bounce rate down is to provide the information that your visitors want most at the top. It needs to boldly display itself. When a visitor comes to your website and right away finds what he is looking for he ain't gona bounce!

This first design actually wasn't too far off. The thing I missed was what the visitors were looking for. I was expecting them to be looking for threads! So we made a really cool, easy to use thread finder and advertised it on the front page. It turns out that stitchers don't buy threads, they buy patterns and anything they need to do the pattern (such as threads). So that was the biggest mistake I made on this first design.

This is very important. Make sure you know what your visitors are looking for. Sometimes you may think it's obvious, but you had better double check and look a little deeper. Because I go this one thing wrong I threw out a perfectly good design (we're not talking about color schemes here). Thankfull I discovered this later as you'll see.

Homepage design #2

I need you to imagine this design looking very very cool; because it did.

But anyway, this second design was a step in the wrong direction. Sure it looked better, but it didn't work better. My bounce rate went up! That wasn't very encouraging. But I did learn one thing that did not work!

Why didn't it work? Well, the biggest reason was that it wassn't immediately obvious that we sell stitching supplies. You had to look one third of the way down the page to see that. You have to grab people when they come; they have only a slightly longer attention span for your website than they do for a TV commercial.

There was the text because stitching matters on the top of some really fancy graphics - And I bet most of them thought, "oh, that's nice... ." People really don't care what you think, and they can't read your mind ether about what you are providing. That statement tells them nothing about what we can do for them. Well, there's always the featured pattern, right? Wrong! There was nothing on that featured pattern that would imply that we are selling it! That one really surprised me.

Homepage design #3

This brings us up to the current design.

This design really works well. In a way it is a combination of #1 and #2. Only this time we had figured out that stitchers buy patterns. That is what they want, so that is what we'll show them! The first two links are for patterns, and according to crazzyegg's heat maps about %65 of the visitors click on one of those two links!

Not only was the bounce rate much lower than #2 but it was also lower than the first design (by exactly how much I can't remember, somewhere around 20% I think)!

In this third design I also put that "There are real people here" section. I did this because I had found out that that was one of the concerns that potential customers were having. They wanted to make sure that there were real people behind the website that they were giving their creditcard to. Even though it is at the bottom of the page quite a few people clicked on it. Perhaps this was because the page isn't very long and there aren't very many words to read through.

One last thing I want to point out. After putting the free shipping on orders of $40 or more, most of the orders coming in were ether exactly $40 or just a little over. I found that quite interesting. I wonder what would happen if I moved that up to $50... :)

Summary

To decrease you bounce rate on your e-comrice store, you should:

First make sure you know what your targeted audience wants, and then give it to them at the top of your home page.

Choose obviousness over good looks. It's OK to make your website took nice, just make sure it doesn't get in the way of catching your visitors.

Answer your visitors questions and concerns (especially when it's about their money) without them having to ask (because most all of them wont, they'll just leave).

These can also apply to any website.

Or at least some of the things you can do. There is plenty more you can do to decrease your bounce rate but these are things I have experienced for a fact that make a big difference.

Getting your visitors to not bounce is just the first step, next you have to keep them at your site... then you have to get them to decide to buy and lastly you have to make sure they don't get lost in the checkout! All of which I hope to write about someday. So for now, you can subscribe to my RSS feeds so you get them when I do write them! ;)

[1]	The e-store frontend that we made can be found at http://starlastitch.com - The tornado that destroyed all of Greensburg KS (where the shop was located) can be found here: http://www.kansas.com/233 (well, the actual tornado is gone, but you can find some information about it)

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Careful with questions

Sat, 03 Nov 2007 07:00:00 -0000

I read an introduction to a website that was three short sentences. The first sentence was a question, the second a very clear and short (in other words, excellent) description of the site, and the last one was a link to learn more. It was wonderfully done.

But I had to read the whole thing 2 or 3 times before I got what the site was about. Why? Because that first question I actually had to ponder. So my mind was working on an answer while I kept reading; and as a result I didn't process what the next two sentences said.

Morel of the story: when writing your webcopy don't ask anything thought provoking. Asking a question for your first sentence is a very good idea so long as the user doesn't have to think to answer it.

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Perception of complication

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 07:00:00 -0000

Why do people see some things as complicated even if they aren't? What makes a user think to himself, "Oooo... no idea what that does but it looks too complicated - not worth the effort," about feature A and, "This looks interesting, might as well give it a try, it looks easy enough," about feature B - even if feature B is more complicated that A?

I recently had to ask myself all these questions. Here is what I found.

People judge a book by it's cover - and they judge a service, in this case my start-up, by it's introduction.

I asked one of the beta testers what she thought about the service, the reply took me back a bit. Basically her reply was that it was too complicated and too hard, so she didn't even try it. I didn't understand, how do you know it's too complicated if you havn't even tried it?

Note: our service is such that a Realtor signs up and gets a website to list their properties online. The part that this person got to was seeing their site after registration.

I looked through to try to find why she would think that - then I saw it. After you create your site you are brought to it's homepage with a nice large blob of text for you to read. No bulleted lists, no apparent 1-2-3 easy steps to get up to speed, nothing. Just that big long boring text blob that no one in their right mind would want to take the time to read. And what's worse is I wrote it! Right about then I understood why that one user thought it was too complicated... I would have too if I was in her place.

I speedily got rid of that text and made it so when they log in they go strait to their account page. I then placed a "getting started" section at the top with some short, strait to the point, links for... getting started!

I wish I could tell you that she tried it again and loved it... but she never came back. All well, maybe the next one.

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The "how to" headline factor

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 07:00:00 -0000

I had read that placing the phrase "how to" in your article headlines was good. Wanting to know if that was really true or not I decided to put it to the test for the month of July. So this past month I posted a bunch (ok... 3) of "How-To"s in hopes of getting to #1 for more common searches. I can't say that I've gotten to the #1 position on very many of them yet - mostly #3 to #7 on google - but I was pleased by the increase of traffic by people searching for "how to" topics.

For the month of July, out of 198 different queries people came to my site through, 31 of them had the phrase "how to" someplace in them! (Most of the time at the beginning) 6.39% doesn't sound like all that much until you look at it this way; for about every 16 people that come to your site through google, 1 of them will be searching for a How-To [1]. Putting the phrase "how to" in your title simply helps get you up higher on google for those searchers. How-To articles are also nice to have as they attract links quite well.

[1]	I'm expecting this to go up in Augest as all of the how-to articles will be there already. UPDATE: for the month of October, over 90 queries out of 503 had the phrase "how to" in them.

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Why divs are so great

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 07:00:00 -0000

Recently I had some people come to my site searching for "what makes divs so great" (Yes, big brother is watching your moves! MUHAHAHA!) I didn't think any of my articles made that completely clear though - so here are 4 reasons why div tags are so great.

Faster page loads. Using div tags instead of tables make your pages smaller and faster to download. Although not the main thing for speed, it does help.

More maintainable. HTML layouts made with div tags are much easier to read, understand, and maintain. That's good for you.
Styleable. div tags are great when it comes time for css!

The real gurus use them. And for these good reasons too!

But wait! What if I use a WYSIWYG editor like dreamweaver? Why does it matter?

Point #1 aside, if you are serious about web development, you shouldn't be using a WYSIWYG editor.

So if those aren't good enough reasons to use div tags... I don't know what is. Cause those are what makes them great! (well not so much #4...)

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Make your website load fast

Sun, 29 Jul 2007 07:00:00 -0000

For the past week I have been on a very slow internet connection. Not because I want to but because it's my only option. Many times I will get upwards 1KB/sec! That's slow! Some pages won't even load - while others, relatively speaking, load blazing fast.

So I did a bit of research on why some pages load fast and why others not at all. This article covers what I found.

HTTP Requests

The number of HTTP requests is the leading factor for page load times. Websites above 30 requests normally won't even load for me. An HTTP request isn't just the query to the page, one has to be sent out for each file used on the site. Using the firefox extention FireBug allows us to easily see this. My site makes 7:

As you can see, the size differences here don't mean anything, the number of requests means everything. Some requests simply take a while before they get through. Again, this is the same for high speed connections... just not amplified quit as much...

The browser will only do so many requests simultaneously. When you have 30 requests on your page it can really bog your load time down.

I could make my site load even faster by combining my two css files into one and getting rid of google analytics... but I don't think 7 is too many requests.

There are other things that determin your load times but this is the big one. Size matters but not so much on high speed internet. The number of HTTP requests makes an impact with all connection speeds.

For further learning I suggest you check out Yahoo's YSlow.

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What clean website design is

Tue, 24 Jul 2007 07:00:00 -0000

In the past I have talked about why clean web design is best but yesterday it occurred to me that some people might not know what "clean design" really means. So here are some things that characterize clean web design. If you want to make your website better, I recommend you make your design follow these!

Let's start with some of the bigger (more obvious?) ones and work our way down.

No animations! The number one thing you can do to make your website look junky is to have animations on it. Animated GIF images to those "cool" flash things are just plain un-clean design. They distract your users which don't give a darn about fancy (and in some opinions ugly) fluff. Would you use google if they had a bunch of flashing ipods that you could shoot at? I would go use Clusty!

No Popups. OK, I think just about everyone knows not to have these, but just making sure.
No intro. Don't have an intro to your website. The only people that like them are people that make them. And most your visitors won't make them (and thus won't like them).
Abstain from using flash as a UI (user interface) widget (such as a button or something you would use to navigate your website.) Flash is good for youtube movies, google analytics, or browser based games, but not for your design! If you disagree with me go ask someone who heavily uses flash for design to get an answer that will make you happy - but you won't get around search engines not being able index your site properly (google can't see links nor content embedded in flash.)
Good color scheme. It is necessary to have an appealing color scheme that doesn't blind people or make them cringe. A good place to pick a nice one up is Adobe's Kuler.

Few images. Try to make your site use as few images as you can. They increase load times (as well as the amount of bandwidth you have to pay for) and are difficult to make look good. If you are good at making images look nice in a design, be sure to keep their size down as much as you can while still retaining high quality (use the png format). I'm not against using images in a design (I use them in this tutorial), just be careful!

And last but not least, make sure your homepage is good! Best way to scare off visitors is to have a bad one... and the last survey I saw showed that most web masters want their visitors to stay.

And that's all folks! Well, not really, but a good start. There are many many more small things you can do to make your design cleaner, but these are the main ones.

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How to make money from your blog

Fri, 20 Jul 2007 07:00:00 -0000

After extensive (a couple hours) research, sleepless nights (well, I didn't get to bed until around 11:59 PM), and long brain storms (at least one that lasted a couple minuets); I believe I have discovered the secrite to making money from a blog... Seriously!

Starting a blog that will make money can be broken down into 3 simple steps that any one can do, we just need to get creative and think outsite of the box.

Start a blog. This first step is pretty much expected, if you want a blog to make money you have to have a blog. Go to blogger and grab a free one or buy a domain and some hosting to set one up.
Write articles on how to make money. Even if it's about making money from a blog! This step will likely be the most difficult for you, but it doesn't have to be the least fun. Again, if you go about this creatively it won't be too hard. Keep reading for ideas on how and what to write.
Place ads on it. Get google adsense.

Above I mentioned about having to write articles about making money (although it can be on any topic you want, making money is just a vary profitable topic). If you are going to want to make money from your blog you will have to write good quality, informative, articles that people will read.

The how

Well Joey, what if I don't know how to make money on a blog? How do I write about it if all I know about it is what you're telling me here?! Simple, you can't. But wait! it's easy to learn, if you are serious about this! You don't have to be an expert in the field to teach others about it! In other words, you don't need to know everything there is to know about making money from a blog to teach other people how to do it! You can be an amateur and provide very useful information to beginners. It's true you won't get many readers that are armatures on the same level as you, but there are plenty of beginners to go around.

To become an amateur at something you just have to learn about it and try it. To become an expert at something you will have to practice your amateur skills until one day after you have made $4000 in one month from your blog and have 40,000 readers it'll dawn on you that you're an expert. I'm still an amateur at this, I don't make $4000 from my blog nor do I have 40,000 readers. But if I continue to write what I know on the subject I'll get better. I'll learn what works and what doesn't. That's how you get better, you can't become an expert at making money from a blog by just reading the blogs of the experts, you have to try it yourself! Reading the blogs of the experts is one way you can learn to be an amateur, true, but just doing that you won't get beyond an amateur.

It's just like writing; you can read all you want about writing but until you get actual experience writing you aren't going to get good.

The what

Getting started with your blog can be a bit difficult. Reading what the experts say can provide you with great ideas on what to write! Try taking older articles that have valuable content, but aren't getting much notice (maybe due to a bad headline) and rewriting it in your own words, trying to make it easier to understand. When you do this you'll also find that you'll start putting your own ideas and advice in without even thinking about it. After a while you'll just start being able to write completely original articles yourself!

Note: When I say reword an article, I mean taking the information in the article as a whole and saying it all in your own words, not just rearranging or replacing words with synonyms!

For example, when I started this blog on web development, I didn't know what to write! Open up the last page on my blog index in another browser window and you'll see the first one I wrote was a tutorial on how to make an xhtml layout. I just wrote about what I knew how to do, little though it be. Next I wrote my opinion about website design. The next two articles where my opinions on development tools. That's when I ran dry. I simply didn't know what to write about next! My list of ideas to write about was blank! Take a look at the next one I wrote about AIDA. If you read it you'll find it was just me rewording what I read elsewhere, then adding my own comments to it. Not really original but still usefull to some.

I still have my low times but in general I have an easier time writing. And I rarely will directly reword some other information I found, but I did do that to get going. There's nothing wrong with it ether so long as you don't directly copy someone else!

It may all sound mysterious, difficult and confusing to do but once you dive in and finish struggling around to keep your head above the water it's a lot of fun. You're mind clears up and you are able to get a grasp on what it's all about and how to do it. It won't be confusing but rather relaxing. It's not just about making money on your blog! There is a great feeling of accomplishment when you can write a blog that real people find helpfull and will spend their time reading. But you'll never get there just thinking about it, you have to try!

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