Affiliate design

[jackson992]

I've recently been changing my desing on my main site and wondered if people thought it helped conversions. A,k.a Does the design affect how well we do?

[R3born]

IMHO, usability and loading speed have more influence on conversion rate. Your customer must be able to find what he finds with one-two clicks, if he does not, he'll simply go to another web site.

[Cedric]

Design ABSOLUTELY influences success. But I include "usability and load speed" in design.

I disagree with the one-two click theory, though. The end-user will click as long as they feel they are making progress in their task (within reason, of course). It is when they are unsure of where the click will take them or when the click doesn't get them closer to achieving their goal (task completion), that they give up quickly.

[R3born]

About the one-two click theory - do you know that only 30% of users continue clicking when they open a page? It means that from 1000 visitors on the front page only 27 will make more than 4 deep clicks.

[Cedric]

About the one-two click theory - do you know that only 30% of users continue clicking when they open a page?

On what pages and according to what study? I can tell you that I have multiple sites that blow that stat clean out of the water.

The problem with such generic statistics is that individual behavior varies GREATLY with targeted market, subject material, site design, and probably a dozen other (at least) variables.

Webmasters must learn to read their OWN logfiles and determine behavior on their OWN sites. There is much to be learned from studies that have been done on other sites (such as work by Jakob Nielsen, Donald Norman, Tognazzini, the folks at UIE, etc), but that information MUST be tempered with one's own experience.

While I can (and have) learned a GREAT deal from the likes of the folks mentioned, the ONLY stats that touch my bottom line are the stats on MY web sites.

[R3born]

Your sites must be really interesting, if you have such statistics...
By the way, can I know what log analyzer you are using?

[Cedric]

The primary one I use is Mach5 (there are a couple of others I keep on board to do comparisons), but I also export a lot of data to spreadsheets (creating my own reports) -- rather than depending on the reports of any out-of-the-box-program.

I've been doing heavy-duty logfile analysis for nearly eight years now and I have developed my own system. In the beginning, you really had to because the tools that were out there weren't all that sophisticated and were extremely buggy when it came to the numbers...

Your sites must be really interesting, if you have such statistics...

"Interesting" is not the key -- ability to assist the end-user in easily completing their task(s) is the key... which I suppose is interesting to the end-user, but not interesting in terms of a "real page turner."