I know I can get this functionality in WordPress Mu but it's really a kind of overkill for my new project so I was wondering if anyone knew a way I could hack a regular install of WordPress to make categories sub-domains?
Thanks,
Anthony
For the last 11 months my team and I have been working on a new ecommerce site, webtogs.co.uk, selling outdoor and adventure sports gear. Sep ‘06 turned into month 1 for our new start-up.
How well a site converts its traffic to sales is the most important aspect of a good design and has to be the number one goal in anything we do. The average e-tailer converts traffic at roughly 2%. A cutting edge, best practice design, therefore, should be aiming at converting close to 5% of its traffic. eMarketeer did a study on some US sites that were achieving conversion north of 12%. So the design and usability of a site can make a compelling difference to the profitability of the business, the effectiveness of paid traffic and a host of other juicy things.
Amazon have spent years using every evaluation trick in the book to test new methods on their sites. An insider tells me that, whilst they aren‘t that happy with how some of the site looks, it‘s the best possible design they‘ve found for converting browsing traffic to sales.
’Simple is good‘ is another mantra. When designing any kind of application or site, it‘s easy to get carried away and add every feature under the sun (we did to start with!). The more the design of Webtogs evolved, the more we removed. We also stuck a banner on the office wall, that reads “You can‘t sell an interface…”. If you look at a good product page, all you should see is the product.
One of our large competitors (to be) — Cotswold Outdoor — recently re-launched their website, with a new, flash based, offering. Now, in my mind at least, this is a classic example of form before function, and I‘d take a large bet their conversions will suffer as a result.
So what‘s the eCommerce holy grail? As far as we‘re concerned, a site that coverts 100% of it‘s traffic and gets loads of it. Now it‘s fair to say that a whole host of factors come into play here, not least the perceived brand of the retailer, on and offline marketing strategy, etc. The purpose of this article, however, is to talk about what we did, in terms of the site itself and to try and explain why we did it.
I came across an interesting article, 17 New Rules for Successful E-Commerce Websites which makes some very valid points on what not to do and how to improve the shopping experience. The interesting thing here, is this is really only a place to start.
The bar for eCommerce sites that really want to stand out is getting ever higher. These days, there are many sites selling the same or similar product. A non-negative user experience, with good customer service and on time delivery of the correct product is no longer enough to ensure repeat business or the kind of stellar growth seen 5 years ago.
We started off with a truly bad design. We made several classic mistakes and didn‘t think our market through clearly enough.
Our top 5 mistakes:
The next iterations saw some significant moves in the right direction. By this time, we were getting input from a larger and far more experienced team, had some design expertise on board and had Phil Wilkinson aboard, providing valuable insight into conversions from his Kelkoo days.
The current version of the site is our 4th. We‘ve split the development into multiple phases, with less critical but more interesting features put on hold for a future release.
The top 5 improvements we‘ve made, as at Version 4:
The more product you can pack per pixel, the better the site will be, right? It‘s certainly one of those unwritten rules that gets banded around these kind of articles. We did quite a bit of work on this. We looked at how the ’majors‘ did things, talked to everyone we could, read a multitude of articles and generally examined how we used ecommerce sites ourselves.
50% of our research supported the ’grid‘ view, 5 or 6 products across by any number of rows deep, as used by Play, Gap, etc.
The other 50% supported a more detailed ’list‘ view, with more information per product, but less product per pixel, as used by Amazon and others.
So, in the end we did both. Each product result page can be viewed either as a 5 across grid, or in list view. The default (at the moment!) is grid as we think this will convert slightly better, but if the user changes view, we remember this and always show the preferred view thereafter (cookies willing).
We also allow the customer to change the colour of a product and see an enlarged view, from the results page, assuming they are in ’list view‘.
An interesting side effect of the grid/list topic, is the ability to buy from a list view, without clicking through to the single product view. Gap does this on their website, I would love to know how or if this increases conversions.
Until our site goes live, we have no traffic to play with. With that in mind, we‘ve set-up a closed test group of about 40 people. We‘ve split the group roughly in half for gender, and tried to get a good mix of technical / non technical and nice spread of ages.
Every couple of weeks we release a new version of the site, and ask the group to test new features. Each page of our ’sandbox‘ version has a text box below the footer for comments and bugs. The users log in and we track where they click, what they look at and, obviously, what comments they give us. I would highly recommend this approach to anyone doing a similar project, it‘s proved hugely valuable on a number of levels.
Top 5 things we‘ve learned from our closed testers:
So, if we get a chance to write anymore here, we‘ll talk in detail about other areas of the site like the checkout process, our detailed product pages, and how we‘re going to bring community features to the venture. We're happy to be honest, open, and upfront and of course get any feedback we can.
I always end up with a ton of open tabs in my browser. Here’s some of the things I’ve enjoyed, but won’t do a full-scale blog post about. You might have missed these the first time around:
- Mike Grehan noticed a Google experiment to let users suggest urls to Google for specific searches. If you repeat the search, your suggestion will show up at #1 for you. Google is always running a bunch of experiments; I just like the idea of users contributing suggestions to Google.
- I noticed two good articles about using AdWords well. The first one is from Amy Konefal. She walks you through separate bids for content vs. search ads; the ability to not show ads to sites you choose to exclude; Google’s Placement Performance reports, and how to check the return-on-investment (ROI) for individual sites; how to ramp up advertising using site targeting for sites that perform especially well; and how to mine Google’s new Search Query reports to find new keywords to bid on, or poorly performing keywords to exclude by adding as a negative keyword. You should really go read the whole post though; it puts some of Google’s ad tools in a nice historical perspective. It also drives home that Google provides a lot of tools for the advertisers that are willing to invest the time. I believe that the more familiar you become with AdWords, the better your ROI will be.
- The other AdWords article I enjoyed was by a post by Brad Geddes. Geddes discusses some of the same ground as Konefal from a slightly different viewpoint. Geddes additionally mentions geotargeting to improve your ROI, the fact that you can exclude IP addresses from seeing your ads, the fact that Site Exclusion allows you to block an unlimited number of sites, and Google’s invalid clicks report. That report tells you how many ad clicks were discarded by Google so you didn’t have to pay for them. Geddes points out that the invalid clicks report can help reconcile your analytics results with your ad clicks. Together these two articles cover a lot of AdWords tools. There are still a few other things you can explore, such as auto-tagging your ad clicks so that things like page reloads and back-button navigation don’t cause confusion.
- Walkscore takes an address and estimates how “walkable” that address is. It looks at things like where the nearest grocery store is, how far it is to the nearest bookstore, etc. It’s a pretty neat use of web APIs for maps.
- I’m normally not a sucker for Matt-baiting. I didn’t link to the Cartoon Matt doll (until now, I guess). But I have to say that I really enjoyed LOLCUTTS. Very creative, Michael. 
I’m surprised that you didn’t take advantage of some of my sillier photos.
- People have figured out how to compile and load native apps on the iPhone. One recent thing I’ve seen is an NES emulator for the iPhone. It’s not something I’d run, but I still like the idea of being able to run my own programs on the iPhone. Now if homebrew iPhone apps could read the tilt sensor well, maybe I wouldn’t have to carry a pedometer in my pocket.
We are normally so positive about stuff here at Fadtastic. I thought I’d be different and see what we all thought about something negative for once! We are people who face problems on a day to day basis so this shouldn’t be a problem. I just wanted to put something to you which has been a concern of mine for a while (WARNING: doom and gloom from Matt coming up… Any who have heart conditions may want to stop reading…).
What I want to ask you all is this; will software ever catch up those of us who code from scratch? The main reasons our jobs are safe at the moment is simply because:
1) The current website building software is not very good. Dreamweaver and Front Page are ok, but still don’t seem to have got it right with terribly messy code, poor accessibility considerations and cross browser bugs.
2) We can use our ‘web developer’ intellects to problem solve these issues or, if you’re like me and you got so fed up with these programmes you code from scratch.
What would happen, fellow developers, if a piece of software came along which was about easy to use, taking coding out of the way and simply allowing the user to design his sight from a visual perspective. What if it did all doing all the coding for him (or her if we are being PC – don’t shoot me girls)? What if the code, which this masterful piece of software chucked out, was accessible and worked across browsers. What if this super piece of software made it easy to work with databases and MYSQL, using a slick desktop interface to allow you to make decisions and develop a site without ANY knowledge of HTML CSS, PHP, ASP or whatever. Is this possible? Surely it is. I’m sure there are probably some boffins working on it right now.
If ever such a piece of software was developed suddenly our jobs might be a little less secure than they are now. The emphasis would go back to the visual side of things. Those of us with print and marketing skills will be ok but the industry which is the web might suffer.
If you think this is impossible consider what happened in the print world. The only people who could print things were those who knew how to use the early printing presses. They did the designs, they were the developers (like web developers today). Then computers and software came along which left a lot of these printers out of work – no more a need for typesetters and machine workers (apart from on the maintenance and set up side of things – I’m talking design here). I couldn’t work a printing press but I can develop and artwork up a brochure for print. What if this happens to web? The developers getting there hands dirty with code will get left by the wayside and their only use will be set up and maintenance. These two things unlike print can be done with software also so I doubt if they will even be left to do!
So what I’m saying is simply this. Enjoy it while it lasts. Continue to learn new things and try and develop skills which software cannot do – eg, marketing tactics, branding, creativity etc.
Does anybody else have these views. Have I got it wrong. Maybe it is impossible for software to get that advanced, share your views below…
I hope I haven’t pushed anyone over the edge with this! Stay with us and vent your views below!
