When building a website, you can’t get away from spending a large chunk of time deciding which layout is best and which content will deliver results. But when it finally reaches the web, how do you know you made the right decisions? Could that sales bump have been 9% instead of 5 if the subscribe button were bigger? How do you know traffic wouldn’t have doubled if you had done something slightly different on your home page?
Without some method of testing your decisions are based on educated guesses at best and random choices at worst. Fortunately simple A/B testing fits the bill and now Google’s Website Optimizer makes it simple. Go to http://www.google.com/websiteoptimizer to get started. If you have an account with any other Google tool such as Analytics or Gmail you can use the same login otherwise create an account.
Once inside Google does a great job of taking you step by step through the process. Click “Create a new experiment” to get started then choose which type of test (experiment) you want to run: either a simple A/B test where you test two or more versions of a page or a Multivariate test which allows you to test content 
variations from multiple sections on the same page. If you don’t know which one to choose, here are a couple of examples.
If you want to compare the conversions for two e-commerce page layouts where one has the “Buy now” button next to the product image and the other has the same button below the product description, you would choose the Google test called “A/B Experiment”.
However if you have a subscription landing page with several subscribe links spread across the page and you want to know how each one performs, you would choose “Multivariate Experiment”. There is one caveat. Continue Reading »
such as out of date plug-in detection (good for thwarting hackers who take advantage of bugs in old versions of plug-ins like Flash) and full-screen video for a few video formats. Those are all much appreciated, but the one that takes the cake is support for “Personas”.
lives easier. That’s why IE may still have more overall users in the world, but amongst developers, Firefox rules. Not only is it a far better browser, but the extensions available can save you hours of wasted time and headaches. Here are the ones I highly recommend every web developer install right away.
Web Developer - The king of web development extensions. This single extension contains nearly every tool imaginable. If you’ve been building sites without this, you have been practically standing still. 
Firebug - Debugging JavaScript is nearly impossible if you don’t have this extension. Without it you can only guess what’s wrong with your code. Also gives CSS info and lists everything a page loaded along with load time allowing you to spot spot what’s making pages drag. 
MeasureIt - Don’t just estimate how much further some part of your site needs to move to make it look right. Use this nifty extension and know exactly how many pixels you need to add. 
ColorZilla - Quickly find out the color of anything on a page. Colorzilla is a well thought out color sampler with a host of options including 
Remember that attractive vine someone planted in the south over a hundred years ago. It had positive uses: erosion control, food for foraging animals, garden greenery, etc. But one morning the south awoke and Kudzu had covered everything from telephone poles to parked cars to slow moving old people. It went from beneficial plant to menace almost overnight.
I have been messing with Google Gadgets for a couple of years. It’s a nifty idea without a doubt but most of the time you need to be a developer to get them to do anything cool. For those of you who are not developers and want a widget to stick on your site or (even better) someone else’s, take a good look at 
Pinger
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