Over the past few months, there have been several excellent summaries on website design on Geek Estate. Drew’s post talked about the 9 Essential Principles for Good Web Design and Jeff put together a great article about website design and usability and how it can make a huge difference. When discussing design changes, it can be a very grey area.

Everyone has an opinion: the CEO, the developers, the marketing team, your mom (ok, so maybe not your mom). But you get the idea.

Today, I want to introduce to you a tool that will allow you to eliminate the guesswork from site design. Yup, that’s right, no more “I like the blue button right there, because that’s what I think my users will like”. Why not let your visitors tell you what works best?

Enter Google Web Site Optimizer.

optimizer_screen1

This tool (free) from Google will allow you to either A/B test your designs or use multivariate testing to determine what works best for your website. If your goal is conversions, you might be thinking, “Hey, we need more traffic” – but have you ever thought to focus on maximizing the traffic you already are getting to your site? That might be your golden ticket. By doing things like lowering your bounce rate as well as understanding your visitors better, you’ll maximize your ROI on your existing traffic.

Let’s take a quick look at how we ran an experiment at House Buyer Network. Our goal is to help motivated home sellers who want to sell my house. We wanted to understand how our visitors trust our brand a bit better.

For our testing purposes, we chose to run a simple A/B test. The test we ran looked specifically at showing our Thawte SSL Trust Seal on the home page and how that display could/would affect visitor trust in our brand. We’ve had our SSL for a long time but we didn’t show it to our site visitors. The test was turned on for about 5 days (more than enough time to collect visitor and conversion data).

Here’s a sample of the report that Website Optimizer provides:

optimizer_screen_summary_slimv3

As you can see from the graph above, the SSL Trust Test we ran performed better than not showing our Thawte SSL Trust Seal on the site. We were easily able to determine (via Google’s Website Optimizer) that the SSL Trust Seal on our home page was able to help improve our conversion goals (to the tune of a double digit improvement).

In a day where everyone has a design opinion, it might be time for you to start looking at Google’s Website Optimizer to eliminate the guesswork from your site design.

It will help and you’ll know really quick what works and what doesn’t. For a full story on how Extra Space (national storage company) used Website Optimizer, take a look at this video.

Good luck with your A/B testing to improve your site conversions and eliminate the guesswork from your website design! Be sure to comment on this post about how the Website Optimizer tool from Google helps your site…

Cheers, Matthew