JBM Labs Inc. » Industry News

Google opens up website optimizer

bryan — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 03:13:06 +0000

Google’s Website Optimizer has just been released to the wide public and it looks like a great tool for doing optimization testing of a website. You can use this tool to setup multiple different versions of text, images, or even entire pages and then allow certain percentages of traffic see the different versions. To determine which works best you set up a measurable goal, this can be a link to that needs to be clicked, or that a user has spent a certain amount of time on a page. The application will then track all of the different combinations and how your users reacted and determine if the changes are positive, negative, or no change.

A good website should never be static as there are always things that can be updated and improved. One of the main issues historically, was to determine if the changes that you were making were having a positive effect. With Google Website Optimizer you can now do very scientific tests and get a real world determination on whether you’re moving in the right direction.

Set up email alerts for your analytics and ads

bryan — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 22:00:24 +0000

It’s a good idea if you’re using Google Analytics and / or Google Adsense to have daily reports sent to you in email. This serves as a good reminder to check the results on a regular basis. These are definitely things that you need to stay on top of if you want your site to grow each day. Determining where people are coming from and what they are doing is critical as well as determining if there are any changes to these patterns.

WordPress releases version 2.5

bryan — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 04:03:34 +0000

WordPress has released a major new version with version 2.5. There are major changes to the Admin interface as well as several other updates and fixes. Searching now includes pages and posts by default so that you don’t have to use a 3rd party plugin to do this. These changes go a long way towards making WordPress a great piece of infrastructure to build a web presence off of.

Two plugins that are critical to completing the WordPress offering are the cformsII and Google XML Sitemap. These add some critical functionality for communicating with your users and getting your website published into the search engines.