Measuring website design effectiveness

As some of you may have noticed, we have recently changed the design of our site.

We get a reasonable number of visitors to our site and the comparison period had roughly the same number of visitors, so the statistics from Google Analytics can be viewed with some authority.

Results

• 14.98% improvement in bounce rate. Bounce rate refers to visitors who only visit one page of your site before leaving. A lower bounce rate means that people are exploring more pages on your site.
• 16.79% increase in time of site. On average visitors are spending 16.79% longer of our site, which means that they are reading more.
• Significant increase in the number of people joining our mailing list.

One of the really difficult things is measuring the effectiveness of a good design. Often it is just a gut instinct about what should work, but being able to measure the effectiveness in solid statistic data is fantastic. One of the most powerful aspects of using the internet in your business is being able to test and measure any changes that you make to your site.

In this instance, we made a site wide change and we were able to measure the effect through Google Analytics. You can also run smaller split tests by Google Website Optimizer (a free tool from Google) in which you can measure the effectiveness of changes in words, calls to action, button colours etc.

In case, you were wondering our new site was designed by Ovi Puscas of Caimes, so give him a call and tell him that you saw our site.

I would love to hear what you think for our new design, so please leave your comments below.