Will Marlow

You should never use a new feature just because it's awesome.  This is because "awesome" isn't awesome unless it advances your goals.

My blogging platform (Posterous) added a new feature recently: this feature allows you to add "page breaks" into your blog posts, so that if someone is visiting your blog homepage, they would get to read perhaps the first paragraph, and then they would need to click "read more" to get the rest.  Most people think that this feature is nice because it allows you to fit more content on your blog homepage, but the point of it is actually very different.  If people can read your entire blog post (or, in fact, multiple blog posts if they scroll down the page) without clicking on anything, their entire visit on your website would be registered as "0.0 seconds," because analytic software always measures time on a website by subtracting the time stamp on page one from the time stamp on page two.  If there is no page two, your metrics look really boring because the visit will show up as zero seconds in duration, despite the fact that it could have lasted for 30 minutes.  Combine this with the fact that blogs typically don't require lots of clicking, and you get really boring data on blog traffic.

I doubt I'll use this feature, because even though it helps optimize your blog for analyzing traffic, it de-optimizes your blog for delivering content.  (This is because people frequently read blog posts by scanning them, and it may be a tidbit in the last paragraph of a blog post that convinces them to become a subscriber.)   I care about delivering content, not analyzing time stamps.  The features you choose to add on your website or blog should always be determined by your goals, and nothing else. 

Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge.  Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com.

Split-testing, or A/B testing, is one of the most important concepts in designing new features on a website.  Anyone can do it for a very small amount of money (if you know how), but I wanted to share a real-time example of split-testing in action.

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Facebook_Is_Doing_Split-Testin.zip (115 KB)

Facebook is currently testing a new user-interface, which means they may be gearing up for a major overhaul.  My fiance (Photo A) logs into Facebook and sees the new layout, while I (Photo B) login to Facebook and see the old version.  Facebook's analysts will measure the clicks of group A and compare them to group B, and if the analysts determine that group A is more productive or optimal against its metrics, they'll implement the changes for all of Facebook's users.  Click the images above to see the different layouts that Facebook is testing.

One book I highly recommend for learning about how to design a usable website is Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug.  This book should be your starting point if your job depends on you understanding the fundamentals of maintaining or designing a functional website.  It takes about two to three hours to read, and each page has useful insights.  

A reader pointed out that I referred to something in a recent post called “A/B testing,” but I did not define it.  Essentially, A/B testing is something you do when you are re-designing a web site or building new software, in order to find out if a new change will be popular among your users.  You set up an A/B test in which one visitor to your web site (visitor "A") sees the original feature, and another visitor to your web site (visitor "B") sees the new feature, and then you compare the behavior of Group A and Group B.  The results of this type of test frequently are among the strongest factors in determining which features become a part of a web site.  (When it comes to building a company like AlumniFidelity, which has products that live exclusively on the web, A/B testing should be done as often as possible to help you make sure the product fits the market the way you want it to.)

It used to be that A/B testing was the type of thing that only major companies like Google did.  But now it takes know-how more than money to make A/B testing a part of your operation.  The cost is really the time it takes you to learn how to use the free tools (or the fees you pay to the consultant you hire to do the work for you).  You can begin with two free tools in Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer, and you can get started with A/B testing on your web site.