You’ll find this book an easy and informative read. Basically, this is a compilation of the ION blog posts and articles over a period of two and a half years. Here’s a great take away from Honest Seduction: Using Post-Click Marketing to Turn Landing Pages into Game Changers. … Continue Reading »
Get mobile publishing strategies for usability, design and content distribution when you claim your FREE copy of Mobile Site Design for Content Publishers today! … Continue Reading »
Analyze your landing pages through the eyes of your customers … Continue Reading »
Educational Services Member Benefits
Become a Basic Mequoda Member and gain continuous access to free, valuable daily content and the chance to chat online with like-minded publishers and content marketers.
Mequoda Daily Email Newsletter
Mequoda Daily is a free daily email newsletter providing tips, strategies and case studies for content marketers looking to … Continue Reading »
17 Usability, Card Sorting, A/B and Multivariate Testing Tools from Sandra Niehaus
… Continue Reading »
A collection of great landing page optimization tips covering SEO, website design, A/B testing, and copywriting … Continue Reading »
Supplement your analytics with some cool visuals from online heatmap tracking tools
When I was at my Google Analytics training in Montreal this past December, there was only one thing our Google Analytics coach thought could really be improved in terms of the website analytics package. This is the site-overlay feature. … Continue Reading »
It’s not possible to overestimate the importance of focusing on the core of your brand … Continue Reading »
Can we help you master the Internet?
If you are a publisher, content producer or content marketer searching for a simple yet comprehensive way to create, build and maintain long, lasting and profitable audience and customer relationships, your search may be complete.
Mequoda Group is the global users group for content marketers … Continue Reading »
Telling users who you are and what you do with your tagline or welcome blurb front and center … Continue Reading »
Mobile usability tests encourage distractions and an unstable environment. Like any website you’ll ever build, there is a need for usability testing. Building a site for mobile users is like shooting in the dark unless you know what they’re looking at and what they’re viewing it on. … Continue Reading »
Identifying and prioritizing your usability lab results is the most interesting and valuable part
Once you conduct your usability lab, it will become very obvious to you very quickly, which areas need improvement. More often than not, there will be more than one user who will experience frustration with certain … Continue Reading »
The difference between heuristic and cognitive usability studies, and how to conduct both.
When conducting a usability study with real users (as opposed to an expert review), your main duty to the test is to pay attention to the user. But above all, remember that you are scoring the website, not … Continue Reading »
A heuristic evaluation is one of the more popular methods of usability testing and takes place with a functional website, likely in the last stages of development or right before a redesign. This is the type of lab setting that we showed you in Monday’s tip How to Conduct a … Continue Reading »
A great affordance test is to print off web pages in grayscale, give a test user a yellow highlighter and ask them to highlight anything on which they think they could click. The first thing you will notice is that anything that is underlined will get highlighted. Those words … Continue Reading »
Paper Prototyping
If you are only testing usability AFTER your site has been developed, you are only looking for validation, not actual usability. But how can you test a website that has not even been written in a line of code so far? … Continue Reading »
This test is especially helpful if you have a lot of categories or sections and you want to know how users expect to see those organized. As the name implies, a card sort requires the test participant to sort cards, each with a word or statement printed on it, … Continue Reading »
How to prepare a usability lab for several different types of studies. Usability testing is a controlled experiment that tests the architecture and user-friendliness of your website. Reasons why businesses conduct usability tests are often to provide feedback to information architects and designers. … Continue Reading »
Treat the Internet as a unique medium with multiple platforms
Content delivery has constantly evolved over the centuries—and it is not going to stop now.
There was word of mouth and tall tales, then public forums, written word, moveable type, printing presses—all the way up to television and the Internet.
What has remained … Continue Reading »
Attend SIPA’s June conference and take home practical methods to make your company more profitable.
SIPA’s 31st Annual International Newsletter and Specialized Information Conference is set to be three days of discussing the most powerful industry trends and best practices. It is being held from June 3 to June 5 in … Continue Reading »
Websurfers are not getting any more patient.
More people are installing broadband connections in their homes, and more than 80 percent of all active Internet users in the US now access the net with broadband, according to Website Optimization’s March 2007 Bandwidth Report. The pokey 56K connection is becoming too slow … Continue Reading »
TMZ’s constantly updated celebrity news draws more unique users by a wide margin.
Entertainment news hub TMZ dominated the Mequoda Blog 100 this month, generating more unique visitors during January than the two closest contenders combined. … Continue Reading »
Capitalize on these frequently overlooked opportunities to sell more products from your website and increase your average dollar amount per sale.
If you’ve ever bought a product in direct response to a TV commercial, you’ve experienced the “upsell.” The operator always has a special, “today only” opportunity to increase your order … Continue Reading »
The Mequoda Research Team has made a list of the top 100 media blogs in the country based on unique page visitors per month.
In the sprawling and volatile blogosphere, mining for a gem of a site is hard work. That’s why the Mequoda Research Team created the free Mequoda Blog … Continue Reading »
If there’s a new blog born every half second, how will yours get noticed?
The average blog reader views 77% more pages than an average user, and believe it or not, those blog readers are 11% more likely to have an average income of $75,000 or more, according to Clickz. Well … Continue Reading »
Looking back on an expert’s claim that website usability testing proved promotional language imposes a cognitive burden
It’s nearly a decade now since website usability expert Dr. Jakob Nielsen proclaimed that “that 79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word.”
“Users … Continue Reading »
A membership website is a user driven, content-based website satellite that generates the majority of its revenues from user access fees. This website business model is similar to a book club, professional association or user group that accepts little or no advertising, relying primarily on user support. … Continue Reading »
Experts on Website Design and Website Usability Testing Can Disagree
“Never redesign your website,” says one of my esteemed mentors and colleagues.
Disturbing words, especially because, as a website design expert and information architect, I spend 50+ hours a week explaining to clients why and how they must redesign their websites. … Continue Reading »
Earlier this week, I got my annual physical (the doc says I’m in good shape for an old guy). My new MD looks to be about 35 making me about 15 years his senior—me having just turned 50 last December.
While waiting in various states of dress and undress, I found … Continue Reading »
Having just conducted a mini-usability test this week with a very confused customer, I have website usability on the brain. We have some tests scheduled for the end of September that I just cannot wait another second for!
As many of you know, website usability is a hot issue in Web … Continue Reading »
Perhaps you’re confident of the words you must use on your website but not how they should be organized. Our usability expert, Roxanne O’Connell, likes to make that a job for a Card Sort Test. This test is especially helpful if you have a lot of categories or sections and … Continue Reading »
As our usability guru, Roxanne O’Connell is fond of saying, the cardinal rule when deciding on which words to use to describe the various departments, sections and categories on your website is to ask, “What would a user call this?”
Not “What do the business people call this?” or “What does … Continue Reading »
Usability and design are two key factors in publishing great websites. You can have a clear strategy and great content, but if your site is unusable and unattractive, it will be difficult for users to find what they’re looking for, difficult for you to get users to do what you … Continue Reading »
Getting the design of your website right often proves to be a daunting task. The development costs alone for creating a website with a unique value proposition can be staggering. Our inside joke on that is, “How do you create a $10 million Web business? Start with $38 million and … Continue Reading »
Is Jean Chatzky, the Latest Pop Personal Financial Adviser, Well Served by a Website that Confuses Visitors with Too Many Options and Stale Content? Jean Chatzky is the latest in a series of popular, photogenic (and telegenic) female financial advisors that includes Jane Bryant Quinn, Suze Orman and the … Continue Reading »
The Mequoda Internet Hub is the heart of a high-performance Internet Marketing System that is fueling extreme growth for the handful of savvy information marketers that have one. Here are some lessons learned from analyzing more than 20 existing Internet Hubs and then designing and building six Mequoda Internet Hubs … Continue Reading »
Reviewing a website published by Jakob Nielsen is a little like giving driving lessons to your father. It feels as though the roles ought to be reversed. Nielsen has a Ph.D. and holds 78 U.S. patents, most of them on ways for making the Internet easier to use. I, ahem, … Continue Reading »
While humans are humans, age is a major consideration in designing usable websites that will allow the targeted users to have an efficient and fulfilling user experience. … Continue Reading »
Learn how one publisher redesigned his website navigation to make his site ultra-search-engine-friendly and dramatically increase search engine traffic. … Continue Reading »
Ever wonder if the color of your order button impacts click-through rates and conversion rates? The short answer: order button color does matter. Discover which color order button lifted response for one publisher by 27 percent! … Continue Reading »
TexasMonthly.com, While Offering Great Editorial Content and Interesting Features, Obscures Much of its Worthy Attributes with Mediocre Design and Undemonstrative Labeling, Making the Site Difficult to Explore. … Continue Reading »
In the past few months, I’ve seen results from three different magazine publishers that have each literally turned their source mix on its head. For each of them, a simple online order form that costs them almost nothing has rocketed their website to the top of their print publication’s source … Continue Reading »
Webpage path analysis for a large advertising-driven consumer website revealed that there was a problem with website usability. Users were bypassing the “browse by category” website navigation in 85 percent of user sessions. Website usability testing revealed that the users were using search to look for reports and articles, instead … Continue Reading »
Two of the publishing industry’s leading membership websites, Internet Media Review and SWEPA (Subscription Website Publishers Association), have merged to create the Mequoda Library, the interactive resource for building better websites. The Mequoda Library (www.Mequoda.com) went live on June 3, 2005. (Jump to FAQs) … Continue Reading »
What should you consider when starting a subscription-driven or membership website?
The answers are not always obvious, even to a seasoned print or electronic publisher. Starting a new website is very different from running an existing property. Over the past 10 years, my partners and I have worked on over 100 … Continue Reading »
Consumer magazine websites are as diverse in content and execution as the magazines they represent. Some offer robust content and interactive functionality that begin to take advantage of the promise of online publishing, while some… do not. … Continue Reading »
