So What?

Maybe you want to find out how people are using a new landing page you built for your Adwords campaign or you have built a fancy new sidebar navigation for your website. Without tracking where people are clicking around on your website you wont know if your users have the same vision as you do. I find without using heatmaps you spend your time guessing what will work. Why guess?

What do you want me to do?

Go sign-up for an account at CrazyEgg.com. Its free and allows for quite a bit of testing without having to upgrade to one of their paid models. They ask you to drop a javascript code, much like the one from Google Analytics, into your html so they can track where people are clicking. Start up a quick test for 100 clicks and you will see what I’m talking about. Plus once the test is done they will email you to let you know. Really, this is a set and forget thing. Although its pretty addicting to check it often to see how the stats play out.

Once the test is done you can review all the different types of stats. By default it shows what links people have clicked on and how many time they clicked on it. It can even tell you what kind of traffic clicked on the link. Of course there is the heatmap itself which breaks down where peoples click patterns are. This is important to see where your website has peoples eyes and mouse going. Then you can better optmize the site so people are clicking on what you think are the most important items. The newest addition to CrazyEgg is the confetti system, which is a dot break down of exact click points on the site. Very handy and fun to look at.

Go try heatmaps on something small. A landing page or a small singular page on your site. Takes 5 minutes and is worth learning how to do and understand.

1. Personalize It

As you can see my old blog was bland and boring. It was a slightly modified version of the Magazeen theme. Partly due to me not being sure how committed I was going to be on this blog. Now with a good momentum I felt like it was worth putting some more effort into the entire blog. Personalizing a blog layout is something any serious blogger needs to take on. Like me, I think its good to initially feel out the website and the traffic behind it. My personalization was simple to a certain effect because simple is how I like to do my sites these days. I brought in a pic of myself and my personal logo. I retuned the rest of the site to reflect my simplicity. I ditched all the separation points and attempted to let the text do the talking and not so much the graphics.

2. Make elements easy to find

I wanted to make the site easier to navigate and understand. Sure the old theme had tons of fancy drop down menus and pictures all over the place from each of the posts. The idea of this blog is simplicity now. So I ditched all the unnecessary pictures and brought it back to the basics, text. This is the easiest way to make use of the header HTML tags and build a little more SEO power. I also reorganized the sidebar by bringing the category listing and about me section up. There was plenty of unused real estate up top to take advantage of.

3. Encourage users

On the single post view, I took advantage of the empty space next to the retweet button and added in a little thank you note from me. Along with the note there are some extra links to help spread the word about the post you’ve just read. I went for the most noninvasive approach and still visible, because who doesnt want a little more traffic!

Positive Effects

Ideally these latest changes to the site will give users a more personal connection with the branding alone. Then I gave them a better opportunity to read what I have to say. The idea with any site is to get users to come back and look at your content, giving yourself the highest possible exposure. Of course none of these ideas are full proof and will constantly have to be watched and retweaked, but for now it will be a good second version.