Another site has updated to a new design: Spider Wizard
This leaves only the two biggest product sites to go.
I'm falling a bit behind my schedule to get this done for a number of reasons. Over the weekend, our air conditioner stopped working. Of course, it was really, really hot. It got up to 95 degrees one day. This made it absolutely impossible to get any work done. Fortunately, its working better now (although we are going to replace it). Of course, now it is much cooler too.
I'm also concerned because the new site design has caused a considerable drop in sales. So I have been testing to determine why. I changed two things at once (site design and e-commerce provider). This was in violation of the rule where you should only change one thing at a time, but since there was so much work involved, I wanted to change everything at once.
Now I'm going back and testing to see whether it is the new site design that is causing the drop in sales (that would really suck), or the new ecommerce provider. It's going to take some more time to be sure, but the results of the first day of testing is suggesting which one it is.
I think there is some...Natural Law of the Internet, maybe...that kicks in when you re-design your Web site. Visits drop, which causes a drop in sales.
It's like the redesign "breaks" some link in the connective tissue of the Web.
Frankly...it sucks.
-David
Posted by: DavidRM | May 31, 2006 at 12:13 PM
Hi Thomas,
When you say you're "testing to see whether it is the new site design that is causing the drop in sales", how exactly are you going about that?
I'd love to hear how you go about testing such things.
Cheers,
Ian
Posted by: Ian M. Jones | May 31, 2006 at 03:43 PM
I don't know whether this is relevant but I have a fast broadband connection and the (java?) menus are slow to load, appearing a second or so after the rest of the site.
Duncan.
Posted by: Duncan | June 01, 2006 at 02:46 AM
If I click on one of your menus then I get sent to an arbitrary page from within the menu - presumably the page that you thought I'd be most likely to want.
This means that if I am
1. Not Javascript-enabled.
2. Too impatient to wait until all the images on your page have been downloaded and displayed and the menus consequently activated.
3. Too stupid to hover over the menu instead of clicking on it.
... then I never get to see most of your pages!
I suggest that each main menu item should link to an ugly little intermediate page that lists all the items within that particular menu and lets me click on the one I want.
Posted by: Joseph Bruno | June 02, 2006 at 02:28 AM