Litmus

This follows on from part one, posted yesterday.

Lots of points of contact
We took some recent advice and added a contact form to every page on our site. I've placed it in the footer and tried to make it as inviting as possible. It's worked well so far, and we've definitely received more enquiries as a result.

It's worth noting that when the messages are sent to us we also include the referring page URL. This adds a useful context to the enquiry.

Testing
Naturally we used Litmus to test the new Litmus site. I think I spent about a day working on various browser bugs, mainly in Explorer 6 and 7, as you'd expect. I've published the full results online.

Alongside some informal user tests with friends and colleagues, we used the services of UserTesting.com. They set up user tests with people in your demographic and you can then download the video of the session online. This gave us some really useful insights into what could be improved, and we made quite a few changes as a result.

I'll be sharing some excerpts from our user tests on the site in a future post, so you can see exactly the kinds of results we got from this.

Separate sections for email and website testing
Previously we maintained a single 'features' page that covered both the email and website testing aspects of Litmus. This made it difficult to discuss the features specific to one service or the other, without it becoming confusing. On the new site we've separated the two services onto their own pages, and as a result been able to add much more detail to describe them.

Although most of our customers tend to use both services at some point, we found that the majority sign up because they need to test either a website or an email template. From that perspective, it's useful to focus our product information on just what the visitor is interested in at that point.

The numbers
The biggest question is: how did this affect our website stats? Here are some key figures, comparing the month prior to the redesign to the month after.

• Conversion rate improved by 46%
  This is people signing up for an account (including our free plan).
• People spend 30% longer on the site
  This means that they are hopefully spending the time to read the extra copy we added.
• People view 23% more pages per visit
  The new site is helping encourage people to read more pages overall.
• More than 2x as many visitors view the 'pricing and signup' page
  I suspect this is because I've increased the visibility of the sign up calls to action.

I'd really welcome your feedback on the new site, and feel free to ask me to expand on anything I've written if you'd like to learn more about a certain aspect.