Patrick McKenzie on Improving Websites Design Through Use of Statistics

April 15th (Thu)

Over the past month I’ve been doing a lot of tweaking of various things on my website, and generally after leaving a tweak up for two to five weekdays (my weekend traffic is highly skewed by the work habits of my customers) I evaluate whether it was effective or not. Its not A/B testing but its, shall we say, empirically driven iterative improvements. (As an aside: I’m sure my Japanese economics professor would say that I’ve just started doing things The Japanese Way (TM), as iterative improvement is routinely credited for everything from the quality of Japanese cars to… the quality of Japanese cars.) Anyhow, there are surely other, better ways to increase your conversions (such as optimizing your landing pages), but you can accomplish all of the following while brewing a pot of coffee.

( from “10 minute tweaks to boost your conversion” post )

Patrick McKenzie double majored in East Asian Studies and Computer Science at Washington University in St. Louis.  He came to Japan with the intention of improving conversational fluency to land a programming job at a major multinational, but fell in love with Ogaki-shi, Gifu-ken and decided to stay a while.  While previously working as a technical translator and systems engineer, he started a hobby business selling software over the Internet, which recently became his day job.  He blogs at http://www.kalzumeus.com and his first product, Bingo Card Creator, is at http://www.bingocardcreator.com .