As promised, my troubleshooting is done (with Wordpress and GA and Website Optimizer), so I can write about the latest attempt at optimizing something not really worth optimizing.  I was encouraged by a couple people to take the plunge with multi-variate optimization, and I finally did. Granted, its just the work section on this site, so there’s very little conversion, but it works! The steps are not too difficult or different compared to A/B testing, and I liked having the ability to test out a wider variety of combinations.

I kept things relatively simple, and tested 2 variations for the control and test. But I also wanted to go beyond having a pageview as the conversion tested, and instead, I set it up so that time spent on page was the conversion.  I figured if this page were actually getting lots of views, what I would want to test is if they are reading the content there.  Oh so fancy.

ClickTale scrollmap: I want to use this with optimization data

I also liked that I could enter in variation code directly into the Google Website Optimizer UI. Later I realized I should add event tracking to the links, but I could still do that by revising and copying the experiment. I was disappointed that follow-up experiments only allow you to compare 1 combination to the original, so its like going back to A/B testing. That seemed lame, but maybe there’s some secret way around that.

Ideally I would then combine the data from this experiment with other metrics like exit % and pathing to see what that tells me. And maybe scrolling data from ClickTale. Now I want to try these things out on a site with more data! Or on a more robust tool. Hopefully soon-ish.

This time I got rid of the blank screen of death in only 2 hours! w00t! I think everything is back to normal, and I’ve tried installed/uninstalling plugins to make things run better. Maybe next time I upgrade Wordpress I will only have 1 hour of blank screen of death! At least its not running on the entire site, so I should be thankful for that.

…because it is sunny again in Seattle! w00t! I am now done updating the site for the moment. I condensed the nonsense on here thanks to the informal usability advice of “Richard Branson.” Today is my last day off this week so I would plan on tanning, but there are definitely a lot of construction workers that can see me. So maybe not so much.

And borrowed from the amazing D.A. Clements, Information School lecturer and mentor extraordinaire,  5 books to read on web design/interaction design from the iSchool webmaster:

• BIll Buxton. Sketching User Experience
• DK Van Duyne, JA Landry, JI Hong. Design of Sites
• Jenifer Tidwell. Designing Interfaces
• Dan Brown (not the Da Vinci Code guy). Communicating Design
• Andrew Dupont. Practical Prototyping and Scriptaculous

I’ve read parts of the Bill Buxton and I think Tidwell books, but not the others.  Now I have time to read this stuff, but I’m still finishing the Polar Bear book. I’ve skimmed it before, but I’m trying to pay attention this time. I didn’t realize Scriptaculous was supposed to be any better for prototyping than another Javascript library, but the same things can probably be applied to other libraries.

Why can I not stop making changes to the site!? Just when I was done getting things looking ok in IE, I go and change the portfolio layout to a tabbed box (which I had wanted to do for awhile, but still). So now I must deal with IE-related nonsense again. Blar. I don’t know why I torture myself like this: I looked at how it looked in Opera and there were a few minor padding issues. I will not deal with it now.

UPDATE: IE was actually an easy fix, but then I realized that the search box was messed up on the blog. 2 hours later realized it was a CSS issue where one div was too big and overlapping the sidebar so you couldn’t interact with the search box, or text, or links. Entirely my fault.

Bentley

In other news, its hard to make sure I run when the weather is blah. I think I was meant to be living in a warmer climate. I blame the Puerto Rican influence.  Also, today is the last day to hang out with my sister and her puppy Bentley.  This means I either have to wait until she’s back to see them again or I have to make the trek out to Pullman and the middle of nowhere.

The good news: IE 8 seems to retain (most) of the CSS goodness that my Firefox CSS displays.

The bad news: IE 7 is ignoring my updates to the IE-specific CSS file. More investigation needed here. Still sore from yesterday’s hike, and now wishing I had a pet chipmunk.

Also I promised I would link to Brazen Lungs, because they are a talented band worth listening to. Check it.

So I decided to cave in and finally start a blog using Wordpress within my site.  The goal is to write about different things I’m dealing with at work and other web/database-related things.  With the occasional happenings from my life tossed in. I spent half my time altering the CSS on this theme and unsuccessfully upgrading to the newest version.  It seems I was not the only one who encountered the White Screen of Death.  Either way, I’m sticking with this for now. We’ll see if anyone reads besides me though.

The rest of tonight will be spent playing with my sister’s dog, Bentley:

Bentley and I