When was the last time you looked your site through your visitors eyes?
I’m not talking about subjectively evaluating your design to grade it on how you think your visitors may see it; I mean actually loading the page to find out how it really looks at different screen resolutions. Are you visitors truly seeing what you think they’re seeing; or, do they have to scroll to see your most important page elements? If it’s latter, then you’ve already lost a good number of eyeballs.
With widescreen LCDs as cheap as they are, it’s easy to forget there are still lots of devices in this world with small screens. But don’t ignore screen resolution in your testing regimen. Without it, you could increase your bounce rate and reduce your conversions. You can’t count on users scrolling the page to see it all; and when they don’t see your message, it’s as if it isn’t there to begin with.
Clearly, this is a situation you want to avoid. Fortunately, there’s a very simple tool that lets you look at how much of your pages is seen – one that doesn’t require lots of tedious iterations through screen resolutions. You can make quick work of the problem with Google Browser Size : just give it a URL and it loads the page and shows you the percentage of visitors that will see the parts of your page at various resolutions. [click to continue…]
When customers select Proceed to Checkout their cart is emptied
When I began using Magento 9 months ago on our live website, our customer service department occasionally would get emails or phone calls about people having trouble checking out. We spent months trying to determine the cause of this issue without much success.
The problem was as follows: A customer would come to the website, place items in their shopping cart, and then click the “proceed to checkout button” from the shopping cart. Rather than take them to the cart, our Magento website would immediately forward them to the home page and empty all the items from their cart. Because we could not find a common variable that was causing the issue we couldn’t determine how to fix it. The problem didn’t seem confined to a single browser or platform. [click to continue…]
Often the most confusing thing about running a website is knowing what to do first. With so much to do, and without a clear set of priorities, you can end up devoting too much attention to things that don’t matter and completely forget the things that do. But if you have your priorities in order and adhere to them, there is zero chance you will fall victim to this common pitfall. At the end of the day, it’s a very liberating feeling to know you have’t forgotten anything important.
So how do you know what your priorities are? Over the years I’ve developed the following rules for managing websites. Remember, these are general rules I use to dictate the order in which I perform site-related tasks; my specific rule is that people who really know their business can get away with shifting the order from time to time, with one caveat: Rules 1,2, and 3 must always come first. [click to continue…]
Web pages that render properly in some browsers and not in others are a big headache for site managers – and a pet peeve of mine. In a perfect world, pages would look and work the same in all major browsers; of course, in the real world, that simply just doesn’t happen. To uncover these flaws before users do, cross-platform and cross-browser testing is customarily performed before the new pages go live. Too often, though, it is a step that gets less rigorous attention than it should.
With many years of experience under my belt, I take it with a grain of salt whenever a member of my development team provides me with completed web code and assures me that ‘it works’. I begin by opening the site in Safari (my preferred Mac browser) or Firefox, both of which seem to handle standards-based web code well. Sure enough, the page nearly always renders perfectly. So far, so good. Tempting fate, I turn my attention to testing it in Internet Explorer 7 or 8, the preferred browser of the majority of web users.
Then everything goes to hell: font’s don’t look right, the spacing of text might be off or items are completely misplaced on the page. It almost never fails. Why is it that a finished product that is said to work so often doesn’t? [click to continue…]