I don’t know about you, but I’m always a bit paranoid with how much information is out there about me. Whether it comes from Credit Card receipts, or data stored on other people’s servers.

Whether it is your information, or your customer’s, you should always mindful of how personal information is being used. This is the idea behind Data Privacy Day (http://dataprivacyday2010.org/).

Personal identifiable information (PII) while necessary to have in many businesses needs to be handled with care. Consider the following steps when working with your clients (and make sure the companies you work with have similar practices).

• Limit access of PII to only necessary individuals
• Destroy PII documents after they are no longer needed for business or by law. (cross cut shredders, and secure deletion from the computer)
• As a minimum format the hard drives of computers removed from service. (My mother works for a school which has computers donated periodically – you would be surprised what they find when the clean them up before they install them.)
• Perform a security audit to see if any PII is located on unauthorized computers, then close the security holes. (http://www.dbdatafinder.com/ is a link for an application which searches for Social Security Numbers and Credit Card Numbers in all different types of files)
• Come up with a good password requirements guidelines for yourself and your business. (more on this later)

Popularity: 1% [?]

Recently I wrote about a company who designed their website solely for users of Internet Explorer. Most research shows that on a typical day 20% to 25% of all web visits occur with another browser (Firefox, Chrome, or Safari for example). And not allowing your site to be viewable in other browsers, is just like it not allowing a customer in your store because of the type of car they drive.

Interesting research is being shown, that more and more users have multiple browsers installed on their computers, to the tune of Firefox is estimated to be on over 50% of all computers. Chrome is gaining popularity as well, and estimated to be on around 10% of all computers.

So make it easy for users to just use the browser they pick, and not have to switch to view your site.

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• Shiny Future for Chrome? (myventurepad.com)
• Google Eyeing 10% Market Share For Chrome. Mac Version Due By The End Of The Year. (techcrunch.com)
• Firefox: 1,000,000,000 Downloads (mashable.com)
• More Than Half of Computer Users Now Run Firefox (webworkerdaily.com)

Popularity: 5% [?]

Previously, I’ve talked about optimizing your website to improve how fast it loads.  This not only improves the perception of your site, but also how likely it is for people to stay and make a purchase, or request more information.

Optimizing your site for sales isn’t as easy as optimizing your site for speed. When we want to increase speed we know many ways to improve the performance.  We can modify files to be smaller, have files load in a different order, move the server to a faster computer, etc.

However, modifying your site to increase it’s sales requires knowing your users and testing assumptions.

Recently I was helping a client test her website to get more conversions. While using the same traffic gathering methods previously used, she noticed  a whopping 500% improvement in lead generation during the first month alone. Another client saw improvements of over 40%.

So what do you change?

There are several things which you can easily change to find improvements.

• Improve your site speed – whie not directly related, Google  notices a 20% drop in usage for every half a second slower their web page is.  If your users leave early, they cannot buy from you, or contact you for more information.
• Change headers – the client who noticed a 500% improvement, tried three different headers. Her original, and 2 new headers on the conversion page. One header did worse, and was pulled half way through the test, the other blew the first out of the water.
• Change images - pictures can tell a thousand words -  so picking the right one is important. The client with a 40% improvement got it from picking the right images to let his customers know about additional items for sale.

There are of course others, such as the call to action, guarantees, opening paragraphs, etc. When you test these, you can see improvements in how much and how often you sell.

If you need help with optimizing your site, contact me and we can start working on your site.

Popularity: 1% [?]

Yahoo recently updated one of their tools for grading and optimizing websites.  It’s called YSlow, and it checks your site for several different decisions and tools which you (or your web designer) may have implemented.

YSlow is an add on to the Firebug tool which is a Firefox extension – so at this point, you can’t run it in any other browser, however both Firefox and Firebug are free tools so there is no cost to you other than time.

YSlow is nice because it rates things on a scale of A to F, for each of numerous categories.  It also gives a numeric score for the overall grade. By having it calculate where the biggest improvements could come from – it lets you quickly find areas to optimize. With the previous version, I took one website which had a horrible score of 18 (out of 100), and in an afternoon with some minor changes, brought it up to a 32.

Other websites I’ve taken from a 55-60 range and gotten them into the 80s – usually within just a few days, depending upon the complexity of the site.

Users perceive your site partially in how fast it responds – so the faster your site, the more likely they are to make purchases or other related decisions, so optimizing your site’s speed can be very important to the health of your site.

Popularity: unranked [?]