Skip to main content

Website Health Check

We find that the sharpest prod to check out website performance issues is the visitor behavior analysis we get from Hitslink. We have been pretty successful in getting composer page visitors to listen to a sample but the sample page visitors are proving much more difficult to influence - we're still working on it but in the mean time here is an article by Tom Bishop on the subject:

Is Your Web Site Functioning to Its Optimum Capacity?

Define your goals for your website before you actually set
about the task of designing a website. Know your intentions
before you begin the construction and also be aware of the
areas you feel you may be strong, and weak in. A game plan
is always a wise thing to have right off the bat.

Peak efficiency of your site is a priority so take a
baseline measurement. In other words, are you attracting
visitors to your site or not? Watch in particular a given
month where there was no special events or promotional deals
going on at your site. Those ordinary, run of the mill
months are a more accurate indicator of what is taking
place. Keep a close eye on what is happening at your site,
at all times. Even if it is something very minor, you need
to know about it.

But what do you want individuals to do while they are
visiting your site? Read your stories, buy your products,
admire your artwork, sign your guest book? What? You have to
know ahead of time. Visitors who do what your site intends
when they are at it comprise a figure called the site
conversion rate.

To use an example to illustrate the point succinctly, if
your site registered 2,000 hits but a minimum of only 25
people bought something then your site conversion rate is
1.25%. This is come to by dividing the number of individuals
visiting by the number of visitors who also were kind enough
to purchase your merchandise. But it doesn't end there.
There is much more to discuss. Divide this figure by 100 and
that shows what is currently taking place at your site.

Your sales conversion rate is self-explanatory but differs
in comparison to the above-mentioned, site conversion rate.
Are you succeeding or failing in coaxing visitors to buy
what you have to offer? Whether you should be smiling or
frowning these rates should make it obvious to you. And once
you know what is happening you can plan your next strategic
move.

Search engine optimization can rescue a drowning website. It
can throw a much needed rope and life jacket to a website by
targeting the audience you wish to see at your site and
bring in more would-be customers. Never downplay the
significance of search engines in ensuring the success of
your site. You need optimization to take place! Some people
find search engine optimization time consuming and a hassle
so they hire a company designed for this purpose to do it
for them. That is fine. Whatever works best for you.

Are the buttons on your site easy to find and make use of?
Is your ordering page simple to read or is it cluttered and
bogged down with too much information? If you want people to
visit and even better, buy, accommodate them in every way
you can. Go the extra mile.

There are professional trained to know everything there is
to know about website performance. Don't be afraid to admit
you need help. We all do on occasion. Seek the assistance
you need and then watch your profits steadily climb!


Written by Tom Bishop of Web Traffic Blaze. Your
source for highly qualified low cost internet leads. Full
details here:
http://www.webtrafficblaze.com/

Observations on Katerina impact later....

Popular posts from this blog

Adding to the collection or ...

There are more opportunities to add to this collection but we think that it is now time to make some additional payment options available. For low cost items, credit card transactions are rather expensive so we will need to trade the benefits to us of larger orders against a premium for individual track purchases. This means adding shopping cart facilities along side the simple BitPass functionality and is going to be a bit of a programming challenge. More of this anon - in the mean time here is another Brandenburg Concerto LoFi streaming sample - first movement of No3 from Johann Sebastian Bach himself and our arrangement on steel drums and marimba - full HiFi track only 0.99$(US).

Shop Re-opens

The PHP upgrade on my server precipitated closure of the shop for a couple of weeks but I finally found the time to work through the backlog of OS Commerce upgrades that I had been putting off and Lo and Behold the shop is working again. I still need to do a bit of testing on the shopping cart arithmetic and make sure that the downloading is still working properly after the changes I have made. I'll also have a look at the recent contributions to see if there are any other improvements I should be making. In the mean time there has been another surge of Ranking changes on Google as reported on Rankpulse and it is evident that our rankings continue to swing around on a daily basis but our overall position and visitor numbers seem pretty stable - even the shop closure didn't seem to have much of an impact.

Out of Beta

Blogger is out of beta and that was pretty painless. The new features look quite interesting so we'll give them a go shortly. No collaborators on the search engine yet so I think we'll do a page on the main site and see what we can achieve from there. My news group post killed the thread I responded to - so nothing from that source either. An index page update was picked up by Google the following day so we seem to have all that part of the system sorted and I finally got round to tidying up the title and description so that might generate more responses. We are ending the year on over 2000 visitors a week on the main site but not many on this blog - I'm really doing it for my personal benefit now but it helps to imagine that anyone could come along and read it. In fact I suspect that we have far more readers of individual pages thrown up by searches than we do regular readers.