studying your site
| If there's one thing all successful web sites have in common, it's this: They pay close attention to what's happening on their sites. By watching what people do where they come from, where they click, how long they linger they learn what works on their sites, and how to provide more of it. And unlike other industries, where data analysis is an arena for specialists, web companies spread this work throughout the product team so that everyone designers, editors, engineers, producers has the tools to make and analyze decisions. "In a lot of companies, this kind of analysis ends up isolated in marketing," says Kris Carpenter, former VP of Excite. "The product team is handed some of the data, but they're not expected to be in the logs everyday. But when you have a product that's active and available online, suddenly the whole team needs to be familiar with the data." And perhaps the most important thing a site owner can do is make this data available to their staff. This was always a priority for Beth Vanderslice, former president of Wired Digital (and the author's former boss). "I was always so passionate about traffic reports and usability testing, and customer feedback," Vanderslice said. "Because if we weren't creating something that people wanted to use or could use then what's the point?" "So the first thing I did was create a distributed reporting system, which allowed everyone in the company to log on and see how their sites were doing," Vanderslice explained. "I wanted to get that information into the hands of people who could use it the designers, the engineers, the editors so they could see for themselves what was working and what wasn't." 3 ways to study your site:
traffic analysis The first step toward understanding your site is studying your traffic. How many visitors do you have? Where do they come from? How long do they stay? This information and much more is stored in your site's log file, but must be analyzed by software to produce meaningful numbers. (See choosing software for traffic analysis, p. 247.) You can quickly move beyond the basics getting a feel not only for how many people visit, but where they go, what they do, and why. usability testing If traffic analysis tells you how your site is used, usability testing helps you understand why it's used that way. A typical test would involve watching a user as he performs a given task on your site. By watching what he does does he know where to go? Can he correct mistakes? you get a sense for how real users interact with your site. (See usability testing, p. 129.) customer feedback Although it may not always feel this way, customers pay you a big favor when they give you a piece of their mind. Email, letters, and phone calls offer valuable insight into who your users are, and what they want from your site. Of course, people are more likely to write when they're angry than when they're delighted. So feedback tells you more about what frustrate users than what pleases them. When you do get positive feedback, it's a strong indication that you're doing something right. Keep in mind, however, that positive feedback doesn't always correlate with popularity. The things that inspire people to write a letter aren't necessarily the things that inspire use. "The things we get the most email about are not the things that are most popular," says Esther Drill, co-founder and editor of gURL.com. "We get thousands of emails a day about some of our features. And they're definitely popular and they elicit contributions, but they're not the things that drive the traffic, not even close."
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EAN: 2147483647
Pages: 195