I came across a great metaphor describing why multivariate testing of ad campaign landing pages (with a tool such as Google Website Optimizer) makes for a much more effective use of the money in an advertising budget.
The traditional way to do this is as follows:
Agree campaign budget
Build and sign off creatives (PPC ads, key words/phrases, landing page, offer details)
Take a sack of money
Move to top of building
Shake money out of sack
Sit back and hope
The better way to do this:
Agree budget
Brainstorm all the things we’d like to test (buttons, text, call to action msgs etc.)
Take 5% of budget and finalise *multiples* of these elements to test
Spend the 5% sending traffic to a multi-variate test
Find the ideal creative (based on conversion data)
The desktop has been the primary GUI metaphor of operating systems for the last thirty years. Over that time, newer operating systems have stretched the desktop metaphor pretty thin, in the interests of better usability and faster task completion.
For example, remember when Apple’s System 7 would open each folder in a new Finder window, creating a cascade of windows that quickly became unmanageable? That was a literal interpretation of folders on your actual desktop. Fortunately, we now browse the contents of multiple folders within a single Finder window, an activity that doesn’t transfer to the stack of folders sitting next to me.
I found the wallpaper above really interesting: someone created a solution for organizing desktop icons which makes your computer screen look more like a desk, even though the design trend has been to move away from such literal interpretations. It’s not right or wrong—lots of people find it useful, judging by the comments—it’s a creative solution to a desktop organization problem.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve watched my mom do this. From ReadWriteWeb:
More than 10% of the searches for the top 10 dating search terms were URLs (match.com, plentyoffish.com) and almost all of the queries were something that .com could have been added to for direct navigation. If mainstream users learned to navigate using the address bar instead of the search bar – what would happen to the search economy and innovation online?
Engine Yard has just closed a second round of funding for $15m, including contributions from Amazon, with the focus on increasing their hosting platform and community-driven open source projects. According to Ezra, “We’re going to use this money towards making Ruby the platform of choice for cloud computing and web development in startups and the enterprise alike.” Some of the exciting developments coming out of Engine Yard these days are the merb framework, which is a leaner/quicker Ruby framework insipired by Rails and Rubinius, a pure Ruby implementation of the Ruby virtual machine which aims to solve some of the current performance issues with Ruby. Perhaps most interesting is the yet to be unveiled Vertebra project that has been described as “a new application programming platform for building distributed cloud applications with XMPP”. Rails developers can sleep a bit easier knowing that EY has 80 employees and some of the smartest minds in the community cranking away on the remaining pain points in the Ruby platform (hosting, performance)
Adobe has finally publicly acknowledged their very important problem with SEO and Flash and has made an effort to make Flash content easier for search engines (specifically Yahoo! and Google) to index by collaborating with both Google and Yahoo!.
From the press release:
Adobe is providing optimized Adobe® Flash® Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines.
While I do see this as an great thing, I would still recommend developers use SWFAddress to ensure deep linking to your content. I can see how both search engines would be able to pick up the content properly, but it would surprise me if the indexing is able to tell a user where that content lives within the site. It will be interesting to see how the content is indexed.
