Building a Site People Love

Matt Goyer

@mattgoyer

Five Not So Easy Steps

1. Don’t outsource your brain

2. Give customers what they want

3. Make it easy to use

4. Make it snappy

5. Augment word of mouth with SEO

1. Don’t Outsource Your Brain

2. Give Customers What They

Want, Not a Sales Pitch

The Key Is Listening• Twitter

• Google blog & news alerts

• Make it easy to email

• Host a discussion (i.e. forums, comments)

• Focus group

• Surveys

• Yelp

Beware vocal minority

http://bit.ly/AR_Listening

3. Make it Easy to Use

1. Recruit 3-6 Folks on Craigslist

• Post to Jobs > ETC ($25-$75/post)

Usability study on 6/18 -- $50 for 1 hr We are recruiting for a

website usability study on Thursday, June 18th in Downtown

Seattle. Time slots are available at 2:30, 3:30, and 4:30

PM. Payment is $50 for 1 hour.

Please fill out the following survey to be considered:

http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB229B7NP4NZ9

Thanks!

2. Screen For Crazies

w/Zoomerang

No craziesPhoto credit: Chuckumentary on Flickr

3. Capture With Camtasia

4. Your Script• Ask them to “think aloud”

• Let the user struggle (they will)

• Ask questions, but no leading questions!

• Based on your real-world desires, determine which

houses best meet your needs

• Imagine you want to get updates when new listings

match your search criteria. What might you do?

• If you were very interested in the home you found,

what would you do next?

Make it Snappy

4. Make It Snappy

Google Tests Search Results Speed

“The first test showed that the more results they added to the results page, the less searches those people would do. There was a 20% drop in searches when they showed more than 10 results. Since their revenue has a strong relationship to traffic and search queries, this was bad.

The first theory was the paradox of choice. That users were getting frozen by too much choice. They found out that people who would get 10 results would get their results in 0.4 seconds. The experiment of more results took 0.9 seconds to get their results.

If you tracked how fast a search took, it hit 300 to 700 machines before getting back to the user. So Google learned very quickly that speed was important.”

http://bit.ly/ResultsSpeed

Mozilla Increases Downloads 15%

“After implementing these changes in an A/B

test, we saw impressive results. Previously,

we predicted a 1 second reduction in page

load speed would improve download

conversions by 2.7%. In reality, our optimized

experimental variation shaved 2.2 seconds off

the average page load time and increased

download conversions by 15.4%!”

http://bit.ly/MozillaSpeed

Picasa Usage Doubles

“Last year Google introduced these

performance enhancements to Picasa to make

flipping through photos faster, and the usage

more than doubled. When a site gets twice as

fast, it often gets more than twice as much

usage.”

http://bit.ly/PicasaSpeed

Mobile Page Views Doubles

"Over the course of the next few weeks, we

made some tweaks to drastically improve the

speed of the product, and Gmail pageviews on

the iPhone not only stabilized, but began to

rise, as the graph below shows"

http://bit.ly/MobileSpeed

Google Uses Site Speed in Rankings

• Google Recommends:

• Page Speed

• Yslow

• WebPagetest

• Webmaster tools

• Redfin likes:

• Firebug

• Yslow

http://bit.ly/SpeedAndRanking

How Are My Sites Performing?

• Redfin

• 2.9 seconds to load

• Faster than 58% of sites

• Urbnlivn

• 5.6 seconds to load

• Slower than 75% of sites

I should install WP Super Cache

http:/google.com/webmasters

5. Augment With SEO

Who Drives Traffic to My Blog

% of Visits Pages/Visit % New Visits

1 Google 42.23% 2.04 45.94%

2 Direct 33.47% 1.80 23.39%

3 Feedburner 6.36% 1.72 19.07%

4 Bing 3.59% 2.16 40.14%

5 Seattle Bubble 3.23% 2.00 58.14%

6 Yahoo 1.29% 2.13 67.83%

7 Twitter 0.87% 1.43 28.32%

8 Redfin 0.80% 3.70 35.00%

9 Capitol Hill Seattle 0.77% 1.73 15.03%

10 Google Images 0.75% 1.63 90.67%

http:/google.com/analytics

My Wordpress SEO Plugins

• Canonical URLs

• Google Analyticator

• Google XML Sitemaps

• HeadSpace2

• SEO Friendly Images

• SEO Slugs

Blog post on Yoast: Definitive Guide To

Higher Rankings For Your Blog

http://bit.ly/YoastSEO

What Were Those Five Steps?

1. Don’t outsource your brain

2. Give customers what they want

3. Make it easy to use

4. Make it snappy

5. Augment word of mouth with SEO

My Favorite Books

Thanks!

• Get in touch

• Twitter: @mattgoyer

• matt.goyer@redfin.com

• http://activerain.com/blogs/mattgoyer

• Follow Redfin

• Twitter: @redfin

• http://blog.redfin.com