Tour of the Mac lab at Microsoft

We've got some nifty testing machines over here at The Rocket Science Group. We use them to QA our work on MailChimp, and to test HTML emails in all kinds of different operating system/email app scenarios. I was feeling pretty good about our "lab" until I saw this: David Weiss' picture tour of the Mac testing lab at Microsoft.

Working on Mac software inside of Microsoft has got to be a little weird. You know what's weirder to me, though? They offer free Coke and Pepsi to all their programmers. That's just unheard of here in Atlanta!

Unique Visits vs. Unique Visitors - Which Is Better?

Remember the old days, when we just measured hits? Yeah, that was bad. Depending on how a web page was contructed, 1 person visiting the page could result in a bajillion "hits" to the server. Then we started measuring pageviews instead. Then we (finally) focused on unique visitors with AOL-proxy-beating cookies and stuff.

Omniture's Matt Belkin posted a good, thorough article of why it's probably better to use unique "visits" as your yardstick, rather than "unique visitors."

For example, if I visit a retail site 4 times in one week, and purchase twice - what is my conversion rate? If you use weekly unique visitors, my conversion rate is 200%. If you use visits, my conversion rate is 50%. Which is a better representation of site effectiveness?

He later goes on to give 15 reasons why all unique visitors are not created equal...

Macromedia and Adobe Websites Merged

If you're a web designer, you already know that Adobe bought Macromedia a little while ago. How would you like to be part of the team that has to combine those two ginormous websites? Phase one of that project is complete, and here's an update from the Senior Director of the Design and Technology Group at Adobe. Some good tips and advice there. 3 months of planning. Geesh.

The First 25,000 Users Are Irrelevant

As usual, while reading Seth Godin's blog, I came across a very interesting link. It's from Brad Feld, who writes that the first 25,000 users of your product are irrelevant. The idea is that you might launch a product and get some great publicity that results in a huge spike in free trial users, but before you get all excited, you should know that those users are probably just "tinkering" around with your product. When you get to 25,000 long term (paying) users, you might be on to something. Fun graphs and stats included in the article.

Should you create a catalog for your service business?

This one's for all the web design freelancers who read our blog (yeah, all two of you). You've probably thought about putting together something in print for your business (like a brochure or catalog or something like that). But print is such a pain in the a$$ isn't it? That's why we all got into web design in the first place, right? I, for one, have already forgotten what CMYK stands for.

Plus, how can you really do a "catalog" for web design services anyway? The price of the average web design project is, "it depends."

But here's a case study on MarketingSherpa on how IBM put together sort of a "fake catalog" of services that their sales people could leave behind at meetings. Kind of like when you get a catalog from J.Crew. But instead of calling them up to order a pair of jeans for $50, you'd call up IBM and say, "Yeah, I'd like to order one of those Consulting, Integration, and Deployment Doohickeys for Surveillance and Security for one bazillion dollars, please."

I wish I had seen this back when we were primarily a web design shop. View the article and download samples from MarketingSherpa while it's still free:

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=27430

The power of small changes - from marketingexperiments.com

From the labs of marketingexperiments.com comes this really cool research article, where they made teeny-tiny little changes to web pages, and got big results.

For example, changing the copy:

"7 Days Free or continue at $24.95 for eight weeks at a savings of 50%."

to:

"7 Days Risk Free then continue at just $24.95 for 8 weeks (50% savings)."

got them 12% more conversions. And one of my favorites is how they experimented with a web form. They tried colored backgrounds, big blue submit buttons, etc. Turns out the best way to design a form is to make it look like a form. Gray and boring.

The most important element of project management?

We've handled hundreds of projects over the years. Most work out great. A handful haven't (win some, learn some). One thing I've learned to do is go back and ask, "what made that one suck so bad?" Usually, it's because we all got too busy and spread ourselves too thin. Project management is put into the hands of one person (instead of shared across the team), and that one person inevitably tries to wear the "project manager's hat" by making Gantt charts, deadlines, and calendars (that nobody reads). The best projects work when we're all inspired, and we're all talking about what we're doing. Here's an article from Chris Brogan on Lifehack.org about project management. My favorite part:

"The success of a project, especially around the ever-important and elusive goal of meeting deadlines, usually hinges on people. Are you in tune with the people on your project? Do you know what bothers them about the project? Have you properly praised them at important points in the project? Have you stressed the importance of one part of the project versus the others?"