Matthew Watts

Anyone who’s been around the Internet for more than 5 minutes has stumbled across some pretty nasty landing pages. Do any of these look like stuff you’ve done? 5,000+ characters of sales copy with little to no whitespace No call to action immediately visible without scrolling Or Worse – No conversion form immediately visible If you cringed at those points and nodded, then that’s good! Admittance is the first step to recovery. 3 Things You Should Be Doing To Convert Whitespace Is Your Friend Whitespace: the portions of a page intentionally left unmarked by text or graphics. Too many people try and either cram too much into a small area [...]

With all the new innovations happening in the Web every day, it’s easy to just block it out of your mind and stick to what you know. I recently came across a discussion with Luke Wroblewski discussing innovations in web input. It’s pretty slow moving, but there are a few gems. Three Areas of Input Rich interactions with input Input can come from anywhere Leverage already inputted information Rich Interactions with Input An example Luke discussed for this is Google’s Instant Search. A visitor is inputting information and getting real-time results that appear almost magically as they type. This helps the visitor feel like they are really engaged with the [...]

Have you ever wondered how users were interacting with your website? Traditionally this is a very expensive and awkward process, because you would need to bring someone in to observe how they use it. Even then, there would be some obscurity because they knew you were watching. What if I told you that there is an easier way? What if I told you that it’s also anonymous? What if I told you that it was free? With Userfly, all of that is possible. Website Usability Testing When designing a website, there’s only so much you can do to enhance the user experience. In the end, each person is going to [...]

Have you been on a website where the color scheme or text size were so annoying that it made you frustrated to be on it? I have recently. A SERP tracker I am beta testing for swapped layouts for the 3rd time and used a 6px font-size on a white background. That was painful, especially since I was having a migraine at the time and just logged in for a second to check my rankings before taking a nap. Website accessibility isn’t just about building websites for people with physical disabilities – it’s about improving the user experience for everyone. That simple change in font size severely impaired my use [...]

Have a website that just isn’t pulling in the conversions you know it can? How about its SERP rankings? If you’ve done all you can to increase them but just can’t, then chances are you aren’t optimizing your website effectively. Several days ago, someone posted on a WickedFire case study about how of little importance on-site optimization is. In my reply I was discussing how it should be high on your priority list because it not only compounds the effectiveness of your off-site optimization results, but increases your conversion rates if done right. After I posted my reply, I got to thinking about one of my last comments in the [...]