According to Jupiter Research, 73% of marketers aren’t doing any testing whatsoever, with 49% having no plans to do so. Before I share 4 compelling reasons why you should be testing, let’s look at some of the reasons why marketers aren’t testing:

• Lack of resources (in-house talent, budget for tool or consultants)
• Lack of tool (now with Google Website Optimizer this is less of an issue)
• Lack of buy-in from upper management
• Lack of ownership of the testing process
• IT bottlenecks
• Lack of understanding of the value of testing / don’t think it’s important
• Not sure what to test, how to prioritize testing opportunities or how to take action on results
• Lack of understanding of tools or testing methods

Despite these challenges, serious Web marketers should push to overcome them and get testing capabilities because testing is the only way to truly know what works and what doesn’t for your site based on the combination of your industry, customers and product mix.

The content of any website is paramount to a site’s success.

High quality content, regardless of whether the site aims to inform, entertain, or sell a product, will increase the site’s likelihood of converting visitors. But beyond providing high quality content, a site also needs to organize that content in a way that makes it accessible to visitors.

Prioritizing your content is one of the best ways to make sure your visitors are finding the information you want them to find, and that they want to find. But figuring out what content is most important and how to arrange it to reflect that can get confusing, fast.

In many cases, designers and content creators feel like it’s all important, and should all get equal billing. But that’s not doing your visitors any favors. You need to get to the root of what’s most important to them, and then provide that in the most user-friendly way possible.

Line25 Sites of the Week for July 2nd 2010

Line25 Sites of the Week is a weekly roundup of the most outstanding website designs that I stumble across during my every day browsing. In this week’s collection, we have designs from LaunchList, Riddle, Camera+, Christopher Calicott and Untorock.

LaunchList

View the website

Riddle.pl

View the website

Camera+

View the website

Christopher Calicott

View the website

Untorock 2010

View the website

As companies understand the importance of users to their success, they move from viewing UX designers as problem solvers (“how will we present all this information in a understandable way?”) to a more deep, interwoven process (“what information should we present to the user?”) and further on to a strategic view that is part of their business vision (“what is our next product?”).

In this MasterNewMedia guide you will find a highly curated selection of guides, tutorials and visual samples collections that can greatly help you in understanding better what makes a great web site design and to how to distinguish a design that work from a cheapo, splashy, all-smoke-and-no-fire design template.

What is important to understand in fact is that the web design principles and best practices are not useful just for blogs, but also and even more for any kind of content-driven or service-driven website that you may want to build.

For example a few critical items that most new web sites have to take into consideration are:

• Above the fold: People should feel at home immediately when they land on your site. They do not have to scroll down to see where they are, who you are and what you have to offer them.

Page legibility: Do not pretend to be Monet. Virtuosisms in web design is beautiful to see, but they it is not required. What really counts is whether your web page communicates clearly what you have to offer in a handful of seconds.

Loading speed: Each and every design component you add on your web pages (widgets, plugins, Flash elements, etc.) contributes to slow down the overall load time of your content. Remember that speed is now one of the ranking factors that Google uses to rank your website inside Google search engine result pages.

Simplicity: Stay simple. Do not throw as much content and calls for action on your pages as you possibly can. Start by focusing your design layout on a few, valuable content items and then gradually guide your reader in discovering more of it.

Here are our predictions in the web analytics industry for 2010:

1. Multivariate testing and site optimization will cross the chasm and become an imperative for online businesses and marketing departments of any reasonable size. Next generation solutions will leverage proven approaches, ease of use, and expert services to enable this transition.
2. 2010 will be the year that integration of online with other enterprise data will take off. Consumers are demanding that companies they engage with take into account their cross-channel behavior during interaction and as we go into 2010, if consumers are not receiving this tailored, informed interaction, they will find a new company to buy from.
3. Interactive marketing will continue to gain adoption in 2010, as we’ll see email marketing, web analytics, and traditional campaign management vendors race to become the owners of the “hub” for interactive marketing, along with optimization and analytics.
4. 2010 will define the principals for social marketing and lay the foundation for the next decade of marketing. As people recognize that media is still media, and that social is about behavior, the social behavior theory will emerge. Social search will heat up among top search players, thus the nature of SEO will give way to SSO and enterprise social platforms will hit a tipping point.
5. Mobile applications continued to grow throughout 2009 and will explode in 2010 and 2011. In 2010, Apple will continue to grow as their exclusivity with AT&T expires next year and Android will accelerate exponentially as more droid phones will be brought into the market and developers will surge at the openness of the platform. This will give way to application analytics that will be generate significant buzz within the web analytics industry.

Quick Tips for Creating a Mobile Optimized Site

Last year mobile web usage increased 148% worldwide. In the near future as smarthpones become more and more ubiquitous this number will continue to shoot up. As a developer, the time has arrived for you to seriously consider whether you should begin accommodating your mobile audience.

5 Can´t-Miss Usability Tips for Mobile Website Designs

Finding your way around a majority of the mobile websites that exist has become a nightmare with the lack of proper usability being implemented into their designs.

This has caused the quality of designs (especially the mobile usability factor) to decrease on a larger scale when compared to the sites that not only practice good mobile aesthetics, but allow their users a smooth transition between the regular site to an enticing experience on their mobile devices.

Because of the instability in a lot of the mobile web design information that is being distributed on the web, a lot of websites have very poor mobile interface designs. Below, we’re going to cover a few simple, yet prominent steps to designing a much more effective interface and increasing the quality of a mobile websites usability.

The text above is only two of 10+ resources given on the page..
Some of the content is a bit old but overall it's a great collection of resources..

Article Highlights:

• Combining the login and register fields into one interface creates a simpler experience for the user.
• How the registration screen is presented to the site visitor can impact willingness to fill it out and complete the process.
• By tracking conversion and drop-off rates, websites can make adjustments to how the registration page is presented.

A common objective for a website is to convert an anonymous visitor to an engaged and active registered user. The challenge is to make this process easy for the visitor while still obtaining valuable demographic information that the site can then leverage to personalize the user experience. The good news is there are established best practices for implementing user registration, and it is possible to easily collect user data without sacrificing conversion rates.

Here are some real world examples of how leading websites from The Los Angeles Times to Lady Gaga have optimized the online user registration processes.

Key Takeaways:

• Keep it simple, don't hide it
• Provide a choice in how a user registers
• User interface counts
• Watch, learn, and adjust
• Make the most of user profile data

Great video, wonderful summary..

At this year’s Omniture Summit, Omniture customers were able to share insights from their companies’ data-driven journeys during a roundtable-format session. Most of the table discussions seemed to focus on aligning the implementation with the company’s goals through a clear measurement strategy. Here is a sampling of some key takeaways or discussion points that the client moderators shared with me:

Many companies don’t have a clearly defined web measurement strategy because they have too many cooks (departments) in the kitchen, they focus on soft goals that are difficult to measure, they are indecisive in separating what should be measured from all of the things that can be measured, and they don’t appreciate the full value of what web analytics can do for their organization beyond reporting.

Without a clear measurement strategy, you end up with mountains of reports and data which aren’t necessarily helpful to the business.

The best web strategies are focused on driving insights and actionable intelligence to improve future performance, not just a scorecard on past performance.

The two essential elements in establishing a web measurement strategy are defining/articulating the business goals and determining the KPIs that measure or influence how successful the company is doing in meeting those goals.

Determining the business goals seems pretty straightforward, but is often difficult and contentious in practice, especially in larger organizations.

When interviewing stakeholders for your measurement strategy, interview at both management and individual contributor levels. Then circle back with the larger group to introduce findings, gain buy-in, and plan next steps.

Focus on the highest value KPIs (they’re called “Key” Performance Indicators for a reason).

In some cases there is no way of directly measuring performance, so proxy indicators need to be used.

KPIs should cover not just the top-line results (e.g. sales, leads, etc) but also the key levers or “supporting/contributing metrics” that impact those top-line KPIs. For example, if the top-line goal is increased sales, the supporting metrics may include things like conversion rate, average order size, leads, and retention rate.

Different parts of the organization may have different reporting needs in terms of which KPIs are important, the level of granularity required, and the area of the business they are interested in.