evolving your site

Successful site owners know that close attention to user behavior coupled with incremental changes can have an enormous impact on the user experience, and the bottom line.

You can see this purposeful evolution in action on most leading sites. The portals, like Yahoo and MSN, experiment with headlines, and subtly change the placement of links. Amazon slowly phases in new features altering, for example, the way the site recommends related products or cross-links among departments.

Of course, these large sites have both the staff to make changes, and the tools to measure them. But even small sites with minimal resources can benefit from this approach. As long as you have a system for measuring traffic, the time to make changes, and the discipline to follow up, you can move mountains for your web site, one boulder at a time.

time.com small changes, big impact

Like most web pioneers, Josh Quittner's earliest web ventures were perhaps more educational than profitable. When he launched "The Netly News" for Time, Inc. in 1995, it was the company's first foray into original independent online content.

While the site was widely read and admired, it didn't prove financially sustainable. "Virtually everything we did was wrong," Quittner laughed. "We learned so much about what not to do, it wasn't funny."

But those lessons came in handy when Quittner (now the Editor of Business 2.0) revamped Time Magazine's site in 1997. The first thing he did was ask: Who's using this site? And when?

"When I took over Time.Com, there was one big data dump that occurred every day at 7 p.m. It was the top-15 stories, written as one endlessly scrolling page," he said. "It was about as wrong an approach as you could have designed."

The mistake, he said, was not considering the users. "They had all this data about who was using the site and when they were using it which they ignored."

But Quittner did his homework. "If you looked at that data, it told you that people started coming to the site between 9 and 10 a.m. Usage peaked around noon when Californians were getting up and New Yorkers were having lunch and it started to tail off around 3:00. By 7 p.m. when they would put the day's news up there was nobody online."

After examining traffic logs, Time.com made simple changes that increased traffic sixfold.


Quittner made some immediate changes: News would be posted at 9 a.m. And since their revenue was based on pageviews stories would be broken out on to separate pages. "I said, 'Instead of having 12 stories on one page, we're going to have 12 stories on 12 pages actually 14 pages. Let's have an introductory page, too, which summarizes them.'"

These simple changes brought dramatic results, taking the site from 150,000 to a million pageviews per week. And the technique that worked for Quittner will work for any site owner who takes the time to study his site. "Listen to what the data tells you," Quittner says. "This is a medium that tells you who's there, when they're there, and how long they stay there. It tells you what they're interested in, and what they're not interested in."

"Anyone who doesn't look at that stuff may as well be selling shoes because that's the strength of this medium. It gives you a huge amount of information about who wants you."

testing your theories

Different sites evolve in different ways. Some-times, as with Time.com, changes are dramatic: A redesign completely changes how a site is used. But evolution is usually a slower process, involving small day-to-day changes that add up over time.

4 steps to evolve your site:

  1. Focus on things that matter

  2. Learn what's working

  3. Experiment with changes

  4. Follow up

focus on things that matter The first step toward evolving your site is choosing a direction. Too many sites waste time on redesigns with fuzzy goals, and site "improvements" that don't measurably improve anything. Don't make changes just for change's sake. Every time you redesign or launch a new feature, you should have clear goals for what you're trying to achieve.

"When we go into a project, the first thing we do is identify the metrics," says Mark Hurst, founder of consulting firm Creative Good. "Is it a revenue-generating site? Is it a site with a conversion rate? Or is it pageviews they care about? Maybe it's not a revenue-generating site, maybe it's a site that generates cost-savings. Or maybe it's an intranet that has operational efficiencies that you can measure."

Whatever the site, Hurst wants to know how they define success. "We need to know that, so we know what metrics we're trying to improve."

From there, Hurst and his team study traffic logs and conduct usability tests (which they call "listening labs"), but all with an eye on moving those metrics. "If you improve 'usability' on the site, but the business doesn't grow, and you can't measure any tangible success, who cares?"

learn what's working If you spend even a few minutes with your site's traffic logs, you'll see some strange patterns: One section of your site may be more popular than others. Traffic may spike on a particular day and time.

When you see a pattern that's working in your favor, find out why it's happening and see if you can repeat the success. (See the case studies on MSN p. 256, gURL p. 260 and Webmonkey p. 258)

experiment with changes After studying your site for any length of time, you'll probably hatch some theories about what's working and why. The next step is to test them.

At HotWired, for example, our email newsletters brought in up to 50% of daily visitors. So we were always looking to build our subscriber lists. I wondered: Why did some subscriber lists grow faster than others? Did the sign-up rate relate to the site's content? Or did it depend on the placement of the sign-up form? I thought it was placement.

After taking a closer look, I found sign-up rates were much higher on sites that offered a sign-up form which could immediately be filled in as opposed to a link that said "Subscribe." This jibed with what I knew about the Web: That people like to engage with the page, and not just look at it. So on one of our sites, I replaced the link that said "subscribe" with a fill-in form. The results were immediate and dramatic: Sign-ups increased by nearly 1000% in a week all because of a small change in the interface.

follow up It's always hard to predict how a given change will affect the way people use your site. So you have to pay strict attention to what happens after you redesign a site or launch a new feature.

"Every time we add a new feature to the site, it completely changes the shopping patterns of customers," said Hilary Billings, chairman of specialty gift store RedEnvelope.

"So after each change, you ask, 'Did that improve the site, or did it not?' And you make totally different decisions about the new set of features you're going to implement based on what you've learned from the old."

"It's always a surprise."

lesson from the trenches: how MSN got people to click (a million times over)

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"The reason we got there was because we had a specific, concrete goal: 'Get a million clicks!'"

Martha Brockenbrough

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"You end up with this ever-building cumulative picture of what works and what doesn't work."

Adam Berliant

If you were creating a game show just for web producers (and if any of them had time to watch) you might call that game, "Who wants a million clicks?"

All producers try to draw users into their sites. And Martha Brockenbrough, former managing editor of MSN.com, seems to know the siren song that lures them. When she became editor, she was tasked with creating a space for 'programmed editorial' (headlines and the like). Within just a few months, the programmed spot went from getting 250,000 clicks to more than 1 million per day. They soon beat 2 million, and then passed the 4-million-click mark.

Her secret? A near obsession with traffic reports, and a willingness to experiment.

"We went from 250,000 to 3 or 4 million by evolution," she explained. "By asking ourselves, 'What words work? What voice works? What mix of content works? What types of images work?' And we just kept building, and building, and building on what we learned."

"It's like being a chef," Brockenbrough explained. "You take a recipe for something, and you say, 'This is good, but what if I changed that?' And you keep changing one thing at a time until you come up with something that's the best in its class."

Constant experimentation and rigorous analysis was key here. Adam Berliant, a group manager at Microsoft (who then supervised MSN) said they constantly test different apparoaches different headlines and images in different combinations to see how each fares. "You end up with this ever-building cumulative picture of what works and what doesn't," he said.

So a gradual evolution improved the MSN home page. But there's a second secret to MSN's rapid rise in clicks: A very specific goal.

Shortly after she was named editor, Brockenbrough challenged her staff. The brass ring? Get 1 million clicks per day off MSN's home page.

"What I did with my team was set goals," Brockenbrough explained. "I said, 'All right. We're starting out at a quarter of a million clicks a day. Let's break a million.'"

"And everyone said, 'No way! A million? It will never happen.' But we kept getting closer, and then, boom, we broke a million. The next week, we did it again. Then the next month, we did it five days in a row. And so, I bought a cake, and we celebrated."

"And the reason we got there was because we had a specific, concrete goal.," she explained. "It wasn't just 'Get a lot of clicks!' It was: 'Get a million clicks!' It was a crazy goal, but it was measurable and we experimented with different ways of achieving it."

By setting a group goal, Brockenbrough also allowed different team members to bring their skills to bear. "You define the goal, and then let people use their talents," she said. "Whether it's the page downloads more quickly, or the art is more compelling, or the language is more clear, or the design is more elegant and effective and gets people there quicker. It's using whatever tools you have ... and then having cake when you're done."

so what made people click?

So that's how MSN got users to click. but one can't help but wonder: What, exactly, do people click on?

people click on:

  • Timely news stories

  • Clear, compelling headlines (not clever, vague headlines they don't understand)

  • Pictures of happy topics, cute animals, cute people (not distressing news photos)

  • Red and bold links

  • The words free, downloads, hot, sexy, and games

  • A link that says More!

So subject matter, word choice, and page design all matter.

Both Berliant and Brockenbrough (who are married) started their careers as newspaper reporters, so they're no strangers to editorial decisions. But their conclusions about what works online often flies in the face of their news training.

Newspapers, for example, consider bad news "real news," and happy news "fluff." Maybe so, says Brockenbrough. But people prefer to be happy. "People are much more interested in happy news, happy photos," she says. "If an image is disturbing, people will avoid it."

"So there's always a balance between what's popular and what's important," she continued. "But just because a twister flattens a mobile home in Alabama, it doesn't mean people want it in their faces. They'd much rather find '5 Tasty Soup Recipes.'"

"Timeliness also matters," Berliant says. "If it's happening today, it works better than something that's happening all the time or something that happened yesterday."

"So 'Stock Market Down Today' is more interesting than 'This Week's Stock Review.' And 'This Week's Stock Review' is more interesting than 'The Basics of Stocks.'

"But if I were going to run this week's stock review, I would say, '50 Hot Stocks Now' Brockenbrough added. "Because it's concrete."

And the words you choose also make a difference. "Some words are incredibly appealing," Berliant says. "Downloads, free, hot, top, games ... "

"And 'sexy,'" Brockenbrough added. "If you run "5 Red Convertibles" vs "5 Sexy Red Convertibles,' the sexy convertibles will do better."

Another thing people click on: A simple link that says "More." 'More' is a beautiful word," Berliant said. "You know who wants more? The browsies the people who click around."

And color is another way to get attention: If a link is turned red, it's more likely to be clicked. "What a surprise, right?" says Berliant. "But what's encouraging is that after it goes back to its original color, the usage stays up."

"So you can see on MSN, we rotate links in red for that reason." And other colors also work. "We've tried bold. We've tried blue. We've tried various colors," Berliant said. "They all had the same effect."

Over time, MSN has built a pretty complete picture of where users click, and why. Still, there are always surprises.

"On WindowsMedia.com we found out last week that blond Shakira did better than brunette Shakira," Berliant laughed. "Same headline, same content. We just used a different photo. Blonde Shakira did 30% better than brunette."


lesson from the trenches: how webmonkey became a (profitable) library

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"It was time to throw out our old publication model, and reorganize the site as a library."

Kristin Windbigler

You don't hear the words "profitable" and "library" together all that often. But it was the transition from magazine to library that pushed Webmonkey into the black and kept it there.

"When we first launched Webmonkey, it was more like a publication than the resource library it is today," explained Kristin Windbigler, the former executive producer, who led the site through its transition (and into profitability).

Although the site was updated daily like most news sites the traffic logs had sobering news: "Even our most devoted users weren't visiting the site every day," Windbigler revealed. "In fact, most people were coming once or twice a month. It was completely logical: They were coming when they needed to learn something new."

Like all web producers, Windbigler was eager to improve traffic to the site. On an advertising-driven site, pageviews equal revenue. And she wanted a way to boost both, while remaining true to Webmonkey's users.

Sensing that the audience craved help in greater depth than they were providing, Windbigler assigned Wired's senior scientist Dave Thau to write an in-depth introductory tutorial on JavaScript. The piece was posted over several days, and each day's lesson was divided into multiple pages.

As Windbigler points out, "This was a tougher decision than it might seem today." Although most content sites now divide long articles into several pages, it was less common then. So the staff had to think through the implications for their users.

"We knew most of our users accessed Webmonkey over modems," Windbigler said. "We didn't want to give them more pages to download." But the complex content demanded it.

"In the end, we decided that if the content was worth waiting for, they wouldn't mind."

Apparently, they didn't. The JavaScript tutorial received four times as many pageviews as the rest of the site combined. "People were nuts about it," Windbigler said. "Our readers were happy. Our sales team was happy. We were happy," Windbigler said.

But what came next was perhaps more intriguing. Most Webmonkey articles were popular when they first posted, and then faded into obscurity once they moved into the archives.

But the JavaScript tutorial continued to draw more traffic than anything else on the site. Weeks even months after it was removed from the front door, people continued to visit in droves.

The staff had to wonder: How did they even find it? The site's archives were a tangled mess. "Even we were having trouble finding information on the site, never mind our users," Windbigler said.

The traffic, as it turns out, was coming from links people had built to the tutorial, and from people who had bookmarked it. They were already using Webmonkey as a library without any help from the site.

Windbigler realized then it was time to make a major change in how Webmonkey worked. "It was time to throw out the publication model we'd used for years, and reorganize the site as a reference library."

Over several months, the Webmonkey staff underwent a major undertaking of re-classifying and reformating all their old articles (discarding some in the process), and organizing them into web development topics.

This was great for users and also advertisers: By segmenting off site content, the sales team could book advertisers more easily. Companies like Adobe and Macromedia were eager to advertise in "Design"; others, like IBM, lined up for "E-Business."

It was a major undertaking, but one that paid off. "When the redesign launched, it set Webmonkey on a course for enormous traffic growth," Windbigler said. By the end of the year (the tutorial had posted in January), traffic and revenue had increased three fold, making Webmonkey a very profitable library, indeed.

The secrets of Webmonkey's success:

  1. Watch how people really use your site. Don't assume, for example, that because you're changing your site daily, people are visting daily. Use traffic logs to learn how the site is really used.

  2. Understand your site's role in users' lives. Webmonkey recognized that its readers used the site as a library not a magazine and made changes to help them.

  3. Introduce changes gradually. Windbigler suspected that her audience wanted in-depth tutorials and a library-style format. But she tested these theories bit by bit, instead of springing a new design on them all at once.

  4. Look for ways that everyone wins your users and your business. Webmonkey's library structure helped users find what they needed, and this led to greater pageviews (and therefore more ad revenue). But it also helped the sales team attract new advertisers.

Top: Webmonkey's news-oriented front door, circa 1997. Center: The JavaScript tutorial (by Dave Thau), whose success led to the site's reorganization. Bottom: The Webmonkey front door, circa 1998, reorganized to serve more easily as a reference library.

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lesson from the trenches: how gURL.com learned what girls want (games!)

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"When we looked at our traffic, it was obvious that the things girls could play with were the things that were successful."

Esther Drill

It's an age old question: What do girls want? But if you ask Esther Drill, co-founder and editor-in-chief of gURL.com, she'll give you a definitive answer: Games.

gURL.com is the web's number-one site for teenage girls, and it didn't get there by accident. From the time the site launched as a student project in 1996, its founders have paid close attention to what their visitors wanted and evolved the site to give them more of it.

"Traffic has absolutely molded our priorities," Drill says, explaining that the site launched as an informational resource, and become more interactive over time.

"When we started, we were really an online magazine with games," Drill explains. "Then we were an online magazine with games and a community. Now we're a site that really focuses on games games and quizzes for teenage girls."

The evolution was based not on what Drill liked, or on what she thought girls might like, but what girls actually did on the site.

"When we looked at our traffic, it was obvious that the things girls could play with and interact with were the things that were successful. We're going with games because that's where we see the growth and that's what girls want."

But games and quizzes weren't a complete departure for the site, which has always incorporated interactivity, and a serious sense of fun. When the site launched in 1996, it had a game called Paper Doll Psychology, which continues to this day and remains one of the most popular features. Fashionistas of all ages can piece together an outfit from various separates and then have their choices analyzed.

"Girls love it," Drill says. "And it's always at the top of our traffic."

The success of Paper Doll Psychology started sparking ideas in the gURL staff and shifting their ideas about their site's focus. They experimented over the years with new interactive features and games, and watched their audience grow. In February 2001, they hit the bull's eye with a game called Make Your Own Boy Band. "It was the biggest thing we ever did," Drill says. "It got huge traffic around one million pageviews a day."

So in keeping with their tradition, the gURL team quickly applied what they'd learned and began making other, similar games like the Valentine's Day special, Make Your Own Sweetheart and Make Your Own Reality TV Show many of which went on to dwarf their initial success stories.

But gURL's games haven't stopped evolving. They're now developing ways to make the games more social. For example, after girls make their own rock band, they can invite friends to hear them 'play.' "The more we do games, the more we're trying to incorporate other people, and bring other people to the site," Drill says.

So what comes next for the web's most popular girls' site? Esther's not saying, but you can guarantee the inspiration will come from the girls themselves.

The secrets of gURL's success

  1. Pay attention to traffic. gURl's creators learned that girls loved games by watching their traffic logs and paying attention to the features that proved popular.

  2. Build on good ideas. The gURL team turned good ideas into great ideas by continually improving on the things that worked.

  3. Remember that people love to play. The gURL team quickly learned that teenage girls respond best to those features they could interact with: polls they could take, games they could play. But this doesn't apply just to teenagers or just to girls. Everyone likes to interact with the screen, and the more engaging you make your site, the longer visitors are likely to stay.

The secret of their success.

Interactive games are at the heart of gurl.com's popularity. But the number-one site for teenage girls didn't stumble into success. The site creators paid close attention to what girls liked as measured by what they were using and found ways to give them more of it.

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lesson from the trenches: how BlackPlanet got users to register (and pay)

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"Users were far more likely to sign up if they already knew someone was interested in them."

Omar Wasow

When BlackPlanet launched in 1999, it wasn't exactly voted Most Likely to Succeed. The site got a decidedly dismal reception from the media, which didn't see a big future in targeting African Americans online. "From a business perspective, they're doomed," one analyst said.

"We were launching at a time when people thought community was crazy, ethnic community was really crazy, and black ethnic community was just insane," says founder Omar Wasow.

But three years later, BlackPlanet has emerged as the number-one destination for African-Americans online, according to Nielsen NetRatings, with an audience of 1.5 million monthly visitors and its first profitable quarter behind it.

Wasow bet right on two big gambles the growing number of blacks online and his company's ability to earn revenue from them. But he doesn't credit his vision with BlackPlanet's success.

"What kills a lot of companies is they get really excited about big ideas.," Wasow says. But the key to online success is actually in the details: "You can't focus enough on boring day-to-day execution."

"We're constantly paying attention to what works and what doesn't," Wasow explains. "We look at where the traffic is on the site. We look at what kind of feedback we get from our members. And we look at what other sites are doing."

They then take what they learn and apply it toward the site, on an almost daily basis. "We're constantly refining the site and its individual features."

Last year, this emphasis on continual improvement helped BlackPlanet clear one of its most critical hurdles: Getting users to register and pay for services in this case, their matchmaking site, BlackPlanetLove.

After launching the personals site in 2002, BlackPlanet faced a dilemma. A lot of people were trying the service and filling out profiles, but too few were committing. "We were having a hard time converting those folks to paid users," Wasow says.

Wasow and his team wondered what separated those who registered from those who didn't. And as usual they looked to their traffic logs for an answer. "We stumbled on a statistic that told us users were far more likely to sign up if they already knew someone was interested in them if someone had already sent them a note saying, 'I'd like to talk to you.'"

The challenge was clear: They had to encourage users to contact each other, in order to boost registration and get the system going. But how?

The BlackPlanet team looked outside their site for inspiration, and they found it in an unlikely place: a quirky homespun web site called "Am I hot or not?" where people could post their photos and get rated by other visitors.

"Am I Hot or Not? was hugely popular for about six minutes and spawned all kinds of knockoffs," Wasow says. "A lot of fun, very addictive, but not a business unto itself."

But by integrating an Am I Hot or Not? like tool into their own dating service, BlackPlanet found the key to converting new users.

Using this new tool, "Users can go through a list and say 'I think this person is cute. I don't think this person is cute. I'm interested in this person. I'm not interested...' and very quickly plow through a whole bunch of people," Wasow explains. "Then all those people get alerted that someone thinks they're cute. But the only way to find out [who's interested in you] is to join the service."

Not surprisingly, this high-tech ice breaker has been a significant driver of registrations. It works for the site because it works for the user. As Wasow says, "It's facilitating matchmaking in a way that's easy for everybody."

In retrospect, these insights seem smooth and logical, but in reality, they involved "experiments and trials and errors," Wasow says. But incremental changes are the only way to move a site forward.

"It's really important to focus on continuous improvement," Wasow says. "That's hard for smaller companies, because they can't afford to have people focused every day on adjusting minutiae of the web site. But that's really been one of the things that has allowed us to succeed."

The secrets of BlackPlanet's success

  1. Look to your site for answers to vexing questions. When Wasow's team wanted to understand why users weren't registering, they looked first to their traffic logs for answers. This worked, because they were in the habit of monitoring their site and had a sense of what to look for.

  2. Look to other sites for inspiration. Part of BlackPlanet's solution came from a goofy independent site, "Am I hot or not?" So you never know where the winning ideas will come from. "We look at what other sites are doing," Wasow says. "There's lots of inspiration to be had just surfing the web."

  3. Consider your site a work in progress. Make a habit of making constant small changes, and don't be afraid to make mistakes. "In the early days of the web, people would have these signs up saying 'This site is under construction,'" Wasow says. "But you don't need to have that sign up, because your site is always under construction. It's never going to stop being under construction."

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how is your site used?

Site evolution and growth begins with an understanding of how your site is used. Use these pages as a starting point to get to know your site. It could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

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Where do your users come from?

__ % Search engines

__ % Email promotions

__ % Ads or paid links

__ % Type in URL

__ % Other sites (list)

What sites refer the most traffic to yours?

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

How many sites link to yours?

Google says:

HotBot says:

Alltheweb says:

Where do users enter your site?

__ % Front door

__ % Other sections (list)

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Where do users exit your site?

__ % front door

__ % check-out page

__ % error message

__ % other sections (list)

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action section: how is your site used?

Graph your traffic during an average weekday:

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Graph your traffic during an average week:

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Graph your traffic during an average year:

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How much traffic do you get?

Unique monthly visitors ________

Daily visitors _________

Daily pageviews (weekday) _________

Daily pageview (weekend) _________

How long do visitors stay on your site?

Avg. length of visit (in minutes) ____________

Avg. pageviews/visitor _____________

What are the most popular sections of your site?

1. ______________________________________

2. ______________________________________

3. ______________________________________

4. ______________________________________

What are the most popular pages on your site?

1. ______________________________________

2. ______________________________________

3. ______________________________________

4. ______________________________________

What links do your users click on?

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

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Where do these links appear, on your front door?




The Unusually Useful Web Book
The Unusually Useful Web Book
ISBN: 0735712069
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 195
Authors: June Cohen

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