This post briefly touches on a number of items from our monthly checklist that we use for our regular clients. These methods will help you convert more users into customers, gain more positive brand experiences, and help you rank better in search engines.
In most cases all of these techniques have been proven to have a positive effect, however I advise you to always test in order to determine whether the change has the same positive effect on your business as it varies.
Use this as your pre-launch checklist and contribute to it in the comments at the end of this post – I will update the post with more techniques as we research and test them.
I hope you enjoy it.
“Sticky” navigation is the result of the ongoing improvement of web usability and conversion rates through rigorous testing and research by numerous specialists worldwide.
The fact that the user always has access to navigation on a very long, information-heavy page, not only attributes to a more pleasant usability experience, but also to higher conversion rates and more pages per view.
Some of you have been wondering how to make a “sticky” menu on a vertically scrolling website, so we’ve decided to write a short tutorial for you.
See a demo on Compassionate Essentials (scroll up and down).
Enjoy!
Recently while working on a client project, a good point was brought up: why use “Add to Cart” if you can just leave it as “Buy it Now”, and what is the difference between these two?
While neither Amazon nor eBay have released any official information on their research/analytics, I still thought that these two will be the perfect examples to demonstrate the differences.

I’ve given up on having my own hosted portfolio with a personal domain name because of the hassle of updating. I’m even considering that my personal blog I run would be sufficient as Wordpress, but alas, the contribution that it gives to SEO is wonderful, so I’ll keep it. Otherwise, having my own domain on a Wordpress would have just been as good for SEO—if, that is where I went to from the start. If this is all true, then I must ask myself:
More and more people these days are turned off by things like entering their private information (emails, names) and then being prompted to do CAPTCHAs. This decreases spam, but it also decreases the amount of people that will want to share something on your website.
Life without Facebook comments sucks, especially if you are looking at it from a developers point of view. Pretty big claim, I know, but I truly believe that no in-house/cms commenting system can even compare to that of Facebook's.
Let me explain.

With Firefox now just failing to 3rd place and Chrome moving above to 2nd, it became time for Internet Explorer reaffirm its grip at #1. To do that, they announced that Explorer will now, like a dark assassin, silently kill off its older versions(ie. 6, 7, & 8) and automatically update to the latest version for every release. Updated without asking users. Hooray! No more old IE Bugs!
As usual, with the re-launch of our new company website, we try to incorporate as many new technologies and best practices into it as possible. One of the more obvious updates for the previous launch of the website was the re-developed of the entire website in Drupal 7. This time, besides many content, usability, and conversion updates, we've decided to try out the new 1140px CSS Grid layout.
After extensive research and development, we've come to the conclusion that this particular grid system will be the most beneficial addition to our online strategies. Not only does the website easily adapt to most of the mobile devices (try it out on your phone) and older computers, it also degrades quite nicely in a few older browsers as well. This means that with this release, we get a wider reach in audience and less development time.
In this post, I've included a reference image and a PSD file (layered transparent overlay) for anyone who also develops using the 1140px layout and wishes to find out what the dimensions are in pixels.

New YouTube launched today. Better than ever before with its new friendly UI, making it easier to navigate. We are happy with this new development.
While most will be curious about the new functionality, we are more curious about how people will react to the change. Unlike Facebook's random UI changes from now and again, this one was one drastic leap, with a whole new aesthetic. Not to say that the old YouTube had any style before.

People read at different rates, especially online. Some people prefer to scan quickly and some like to read every. single. word. In general, everyone reads more quickly online because, even with the advantages that technology has given us like tablets, it’s still not the most comfortable experience in the world.
Are you designing your landing pages for both types of readers, slow and fast? It’s a tough balance, but I’ll show you some ways to do it.
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I’m a data junkie and spend a lot of my time reviewing our website traffic with Google Analytics. If you’re not using analytics I recommend that you get in touch with us so that we can help you set it up.
Let me start off by building up my credibility in analytics. For the past 5 years, I’ve spent several hours a day reviewing website traffic for over 50 different websites. Out of those 50 sites, 8 of them are our personal businesses.
I'd like to jump right into the fun stuff, however we have to learn the basics first. Let’s start off by understanding what bounce rates are and what it means to have a high or low bounce rate.