As web designer you need to know a great deal of things if you want to make it in the web design World. Your knowledge has to evolve with the web if you want to stay in the game and earn the big bucks. Having good HTML and CSS skills are one thing but how do you make sure your design has created the most profitable journey? Just because a design looks good doesn’t mean it is usable or making the maximum profit.

The main tools I use are heat maps, eye-tracking, A/B testing and statistical analysis and over the next few posts I’m going to go through them in detail.

I’ve been creating web sites for the last 11 years I am heavily focused into a few core areas of design methodology and they are incredibly enlightening once you understand them. Between the websites I own and my freelance work I earn a six figure salary so hopefully over the next few weeks I will prove to you that knowing how to get the site built and online is only a small cog in what should be a much bigger wheel.

Here’s an example for you. Elite Titles has two homes pages which I will call testpage1 and testpage2. Which do you think looks the most trusting and produces the most credit card sales? Most would say the clean, professional looking testpage2 because it looks trustworthy for card transactions and isn’t a huge wall of ever-lasting text. In actual fact A/B testing proved the more amateur testpage1 won hands down by a sales factor of 40/1

What most clients, designers and “designed by committee” teams fail to realise is it doesn’t matter what you think is a good design. Unless it is thoroughly and regularly tested you could be missing out on thousands of extra sales a year. I feel sorry for the designers working in a “Designed by committee” and H.I.P.P.O’s (Highest Paid Persons Opinion)” environment because it can and does take months for the business to decide on a page which often threw usability out the window after the first draft.

Knowing what I know now if I were looking for a new website then getting the site designed and online would only be a small baby step to closing the project. I would want a handful of designs A/B tested. I would then want eye-tracking methodology applied to see how the user navigates the page. I would then want to heat map the page to fine tune the page and spot any mistakes not picked up before. All the way through I’d be analysing bounce rates, times on page, pages viewed and funnel journeys to spot any sticking points or bits to improve. Once live I would want periodic reviews and tweaks to further improve the pages.

The main tools I use are heat maps, eye-tracking, A/B testing and statistical analysis and over the next few posts I’m going to go through them in detail.

What I’d like to do over the next few weeks is give you a run down of why these tools can boost sales (40% or more for my sites) and reduce bounce rates to low teens or even single figures!

As I add the post I will post the links below:

Phase 1 – Eye-Tracking

Phase 2 – Heat Mapping

Phase 3 – A/B Testing

Phase 4 – Statistical analysis

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