Geeking For Good

This post is inspired by that nasty little response to allergens that I’m currently suffering through in the Canberra springtime. As I walked home yesterday afternoon, sniffling, sneezing, and generally feeling miserable, I drew a parallel in my mind about the “allergen response” that people may get when visiting websites (I told you I was a geek!).

What on your homepage is causing your visitors to get irritated, and are these irritations so bad that they give up and leave in frustration?

Conducting an allergen test

How can you tell if people are getting irritated? First port of call is your website analytics software.

What is the bounce rate of your home page? How many people are turning up, and then leaving without visiting another page? A secondary check is for the length of time people are staying on the homepage. In combination, these two metrics will provide a good snapshot of whether your homepage is causing a problem.

Now, it’s time to find out where the problem lies. Open up your homepage, take a few steps back from your computer, then take a look. Is your homepage too cluttered, too busy – presenting option overload?

Taking a closer look, is the text or graphics causing the issue? Are the navigation options too long, or too vague for people to understand quickly? Are graphics detracting from the text?

Finding the solution

As with hay fever, there are many solutions that you could try to implement, and it may take a while to find the right one(s). If you’re going to make minor changes, or overhaul the homepage completely, give each new iteration a chance to work. Take the time to experiment, take user surveys, and review your analytics regularly.

Once the right solution is found, you can breathe easy again, knowing that you’ve solved the allergy problems on your homepage.

I’ve just started using giv.to as my URL shortener of choice at work.

The service is available to causes (non-profits and political campaigns alike) only. This is a smart move by Giv.to, as by limiting service to causes, the Giv.to links will gain credibility in the online community. An added bonus is that the service does not allow anonymous links, so links can be trusted.

The analytics are the best I’ve seen to date. I’m particularly impressed with the Visitor Details, as it shows which city clicks are coming from (not to mention down to the second timestamp against each click). Clear graphs showing the Total Clicks over time and the more granular Clicks in the Last 24 Hours allow for an at a glance overview of each links success.

For those worried about Twitter account security in these times of scam Twitter services, Giv.to uses Twitter’s OAuth authentication service, rather than asking for your username and password when logging in.

Now, on to the pricing plans. For a limited time, the Basic service is free, and allows for unlimited URL creation. Extra features like extra-short URLs, vanity URLs and multiple users do come at a cost – from $5 to $50 a month (USD). However, when you consider the potential value of a URL like http://giv.to/mycause – a service like this would quickly find a place in any non-profit’s budget.

Over to you – have you used Giv.to? Will you be making the switch or are you content with your current service?