Tools to test your site for free.

Posted by David | Filed under Design, Ideas, Web

In July I decided to relaunch MoultonStudio.com. It was time. I have been at my new job for over a year, my desire to publish has been much stronger, and I finally settled on a design concept that I like*.

So after (re)launch, I went ahead and posted to a couple of CSS/design galleries. My hope was to generate some traffic so that I could see the strengths and weaknesses of the design and content. There have been a few surprises, and for revealing those, I am grateful to those that have taken the time to look at my site.

Google Analytics = time black hole.

Googles Analytics is a massively powerful tool. You can track just about anything, but there are a couple standouts in this application. These are just my favorites… deciding which are the most useful would be tough to call. I think it depends on what you want to know.

Content by Title

I like this because it lets me quickly understand what content visitors are looking at, the only drawback is if you have not made your title unique… I do and that had really helped me get a quick picture of my visitors experience.

Navigation Summary

I always have a tough time finding this in the UI, but the hunt is worth it. Being able to see how visitors are moving through the site lets me focus on improving that experience.

Map Overlay

Google calls this the “Geolocation visualization” and it is one of my first stops. Who is looking at your site? California? Sure. New York, why not? China… um wow.

CrazyEgg… very pretty

CrazyEgg is one of my favorite tools. Knowing where a user clicks is an amazing advantage. You can see what is working and what is not. I use CrazyEgg at work to test homepages and landing pages. Showing our stakeholders what is working (or not) in a beautiful, visual method pays off. People “get” this tools visual approach.

One of the surprises for me was revealed by CrazyEgg. This surprise was on my portfolio page. I could not believe how may people clicked on the URLs link. And that’s the thing about CrazyEgg. You set up the test thinking you understand how the page will work… and at the end you realize that people are interested in what they want, not always what you expect.

CrazyEggs visual tools make this tool something that will always be in my bag of tricks. The recent(ish) addition of the Confetti view is the most interesting to play with, though I wish I could save the data out as a self-contained SWF (hint).

Check out CrazyEgg and Google Analytics.

* This is harder than you might imagine, I am perhaps the worst client I’ve ever had.

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Permalink | August 19th, 2008

One Response to “Tools to test your site for free.”

  1. User links about "crazyegg" on iLinkShare Says:
    March 22nd, 2009 at 6:48 pm

    [...] I am listing 20 free and online web based applications …>> saved by cityofsound 33 days ago4 votesTools to test your site for free.>> saved by JobMob 34 days ago6 votes[WEB FORM DESIGN PATTERNS - SIGN-UP FORMS - PART II]>> saved by [...]

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