We’ve been trialling some new software which allows us to record and watch customers moving their mouse around the website to see exactly what they are doing wrong, its helped our clients to identify issues on their shopping cart and increase sales.
Examples of improvements we’ve made to clients websites based on these recordings:
we noticed that customers accidentally add the wrong size clothes to their cart, as the sizes keep reverting to ‘XXL’, which frustrates them as they need to go back, add the right size and delete the wrong size from their cart. We now save their chosen size on all similar products.
find customers who have abandoned the cart, those that added items but never checked out, and watch to see why they left (e.g. to find out the freight price was a common reason)
added a ‘continue shopping’ button for customers who added 1 product to cart but acted lost after this. A simple call to action with the ‘continue shopping’ button made the shopping process much smoother.
converted a size chart image to a table that can be clicked to choose your size, after we noticed confusion among shoppers how the size chart worked.
You can see a short video of someone filling out the Evolved Websites contact form, see as they type and also move around with their mouse:
…and another video on Visitor Tracking – Filling out Forms:
Blogging is great if you have a need for it, something to say, something to get out there. It might be your opinions on something specific to your business, so if you have a wine website it may be talking about the wines, vintages etc.
What it should NOT be is a constant update on what the business is doing, as this is not what people go to blogs to read. I.e. its not a place to post news releases.
It does mean extra work for you, and rule of thumb is to post a new blog at LEAST once a month, if not more. And it takes time, months or a year to build up a following.
What it can do is to engage with your customers, provide great information for SEO and also create a strong online community by linking and discussing other blogs and websites.
White Out For the perfectionist programmers that we are: “It trims all that annoying, unnecessary white space from the end of each line of code. With one simple keystroke, you can wash away that pesky white space once and for all!” http://erikhinterbichler.com/software/white-out/
Now to a little house-keeping, a very annoying bug we’ve been wrestling with for years has finally been resolved, thanks to some new technology (jQuery): in PAGES area you can now drag n drop to re-order pages that have a scrollbar
Previously the pages below the scroll area would not be sortable, this fixes that and will make it much easier for clients with dozens of pages.
If you love Adobe Photoshop but hate the price (and thousands of features you don’t use, or know how to use), then Pixelmator is for you!
A Mac based image editing software, Pixelmator ($59 USD) mimics many of Photoshops most-used features in a very intuitive, Mac-based style.
Here at Evolved Websites we’ve been using Pixelmator for several years, the last big issue that kept us from using it full-time was that it did not offer Layers. Until now.
Pixelmator 1.6 now has Layers, which tops off the Slices, Export for Web and much smaller file sizes that Photoshop. We have now dumped Photoshop permanently, its been 6 months and we haven’t looked back. Thanks Pixelmator!
We are happy to release another real time-saving feature, a reminder if you are about to lose un-saved changes when working with text.
As of today (and Evolved CMS v7.6) all new websites will feature a reminder to save your text if you accidentally hit the back button or go to another website:
Today we rolled out a new feature for our Evolved CMS: bulk uploading for images, documents and videos.
We have had a bulk uploader of sorts before, however is was built using Java which often took a long time to load, and you had to ‘allow’ the uploader to run on your computer each time.
The new uploader is Ajax based, which means its fast to load, doesn’t require any special ‘permission’ to run on your computer and is easily customised for future features.
Already we’ve simplified the process of uploading files using the new uploader, simply drag n’ drop your images, documents or movies into the Media Library, and they are instantly uploaded.
All new websites built in Oct 2010 onwards will use the new bulk uploader, and we’ve also adapted it to the Evolved CMS v6 for older customers who want to update without a full upgrade to Evolved CMS v7 (a complete website rebuild).
Recently we started implementing Google Analytics new eCommerce tracking code on some of our clients website, it’s greatly improved since the last version (which only allowed you to see average sales figures) and tracks sales figures such as:
where those sales came from (a search engine, directly typed in, link on another website etc)
top selling products by both revenue and number of items
average order value
conversion rate (as a % of visitors)
E.g. sample sales graphs:
These new eCommerce stats are automatically emailed to each client every month along with regular website stats.
