Upgraded to Vista…time for a hardware upgrade
Here is a snapshot of my task manager once I loaded the new Vista OS. Check out that RAM usage!! I guess it’s time for another upgrade to my 8 month old machine…
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Archive for January, 2007
The importance of planning and evaluating your website
THe success or failure of your site depends on how you define your website goals.
What do you want your site to accomplish?
Customer awareness…online sales…lead generation? Without goals to help guide in your planning and monitoring site metrics, your website is just an online announcement that you are in business.
So what are the steps to making your site function at peak efficiency?
First, find out how many visitors are coming to your site in a given period. A month is usually a good measuring timeframe. It is also important to choose a month that you are not doing any special “offline” marketing that would drive visitors to the site.
Now that you have your traffic stats, what are your visitors doing on your site? What do YOU want them to do? Buy something? Fill out a form to request further information? Once you have your “action” that you want your visitor to take, you can start tracking your conversion ratio. To figure out your conversion, take the number of visitors to the site/ page, and then figure out the percentage of them that actually performed the action that you wanted them to. For example, if you have 2000 visitors to your site, but only 25 of them performed the action, your site/ page conversion rate equals 1.25%. To get this figure, take your number of visitors and divide that figure by the number of visitors that took action. Then divide that result by 100.
Once you have your current conversion rate, you can start setting higher goals or different goals for your site/ page.
Here are a few things that you can focus on during the next phase…more to come in future posts.
Search Engine Optimization - Either Paid or Organic
Copywriting
Web Design
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Comments back on…
Alright, after reading Oilman’s post about his success with the WordPress Plugin Akismet, I figured I would test it out. I closed off comments a while back as I was sick of monitoring the blog spam. I had held off using Akismet because I thought it wouldn’t work / would take a bunch of tweaking to work properly. I have now installed it and comments are back on! Akismet was pretty easy to get going (just get an API from a Wordpress.com account) and enter it into the plugin on the control panel.