Author: Larry

Microsoft’s new site analytics tool was mentioned at the Shop.org workshop, just a day before a few screenshots were released.

As a marketer, wouldn’t you love to receive permission to charge your customer’s credit card for a new order once a month? Or at least every 2 months? Or three?
How much of your margin would you be willing to sacrifice for this frequency?

The new Common Craft video on Social Networking will remind you that independent of any media or site, the real connections happen between people.

Got a friend or colleague who’s dragging their feet getting on the blog reading bandwagon? Do you know they’d love it if someone would just explain RSS in plain English? Then ask them to watch this video. It’s called… “RSS in Plain English.”

RKG is speaking on paid search and website conversion at the DM Days NY Conference, June 19-21. If you’ll be there too, give us a shout.

Can you evaluate the effectiveness of your website in a mere seven minutes? This exercise can’t approach the value of a comprehensive third-party review, but it can help you brush up on usability and conversion basics.

Musings on a recent Surowiecki column about feature creeped products. While it would be somewhere between disingenuous and stupid to count every site abandon as an order sacrificed to poor usability, it’s worth considering what fraction of these missed opportunities better usability could in fact reclaim.

Interesting results from a study comparing homepage usability among Fortune 30 companies and an Inc. Magazine list of fastest growing companies.

Those who demand ROI from their sites increasingly see aesthetics as a component of usability, not its nemesis. Perception counts, and beauty helps.

Celebros provides site search, navigation and merchandising solutions for e-commerce websites. Recently, we had a chance to interview Celebros CEO Michael Crandell about site search in the world of online retail.

RobotReplay is a cool new tool for recording and watching user behavior on your site. We’re looking forward to trying it, even if it may leave us with a few unanswered questions.

What people say about your brand is driven by how they feel after interacting with you– and your site. A good user experience can’t be “painted on” late in the design process.

What belongs on your site and what does not, and the extent to which different rules apply to your blog is a conversation worth having.

Rebecca Lieb’s article on Google Browser Sync champions its potential for improving web measurement but bemoans the likelihood of its adoption.

Early movers get to shape conventions. If you show up late, it helps to be large.

A quick post to note our article on lo-fi prototyping for a more efficient web design process (March issue of Multichannel Merchant mag.)

Read the Boxes and Arrows interview with Barry Schwartz.

With some large folksonomies soon to launch, the retailers who tag early will define the game for those that follow them.

A user will stop and ponder each option presented to him wondering “What is this? Do I need this?” And in that split-second, your offer can lose its grip on that user’s attention.

All good movies stand up to repeat viewings. Here are some thoughts after another look at Michael Wesch’s video on Web 2.0.

I’ll be giving a DMA Virtual Seminar on increasing site usability and conversion on Tuesday February 20, at 1 PM EST.

Usable websites recognize that “pattern” does not equal “clone” or “cookie-cutter.”

We offer this list of tactics to marketers interested in torpedoing their site’s conversion rate.

This post introduces “The Effective Website” a bi-monthly column I’ve begun writing for Multichannel Merchant magazine. This month’s column is about social tagging and e-commerce.

Sara Holoubek has an interesting piece in today’s DM News SearchBuzz.