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Welcome to the May 2008 issue of the CyberArtisans newsletter! Each month we try to present information that will be useful to you as a website owner and as a user of the web. If these newsletters are useful, please forward this to a friend. To unsubscribe, follow the directions at the bottom of this email.
So you built your company website using FrontPage, and yes, it looks sort of amateurish, but so what? It has all the information you want, right? Who cares about how it looks? Well, the people who do usability testing have a nasty surprise for you: Web users do care how a site looks, and a lot more than you might think. Some of those marketing types who measure everything did some measurements on some ecommerce sites. The marketing folks wanted to know what (if anything) would change what they called the "conversion rate," which is a fancy marketing term for what percentage of site visitors actually buy something. What they found shocked even them, and it takes some doing to shock a marketing person. They discovered that they could increase the conversion rate up to 20% with better design. No changes to the product, not even any changes to the product description, just a change to the page design to make it clearer and more pleasant to use. Now we know that not all of you sell products on the web, but many of the principles that apply to ecommerce can be applied to other sites. After all, almost all of you are selling something, whether you are a consultant selling your services, a non- profit "selling" your vision and looking for contributions, an organization "selling" your agenda and looking for members, or a politician "selling" your policies and looking for voters. Not satisified with this revelation, the marketing folks went looking for more surprises. They wanted to know how long it takes a visitor to form a positive or negative impression of a site, so they showed subjects images of sites for varying lengths of times. Want to guess how long it took most people to form an impression? You're guessing way too high. The number they came up with was one-twentieth of a second. Nowhere near long enough to read any of the text, just long enough to see the overall look and feel of the site. Would you like your website to look as professional as you are? Contact us and we can make it happen. 
A few issues back we talked about the "Browser Wars," and how browser incompatibility drives web developers crazy. Well, there are some solutions out there. They aren't particularly graceful, but they work. One of the best is the multiple style sheet solution. First a little background. Modern websites are built with something called Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS. These style sheets determine a lot of the look and feel of the site -- things like the font being used, the spacing between paragraphs, the amount each bullet is indented, the color of text, how text changes when you mouse over it, etc., etc. The great thing about style sheets is that you can make a single change and change every paragraph in the entire website. But browser incompatibility rears its ugly head here because browsers don't interpret the style sheets the same way. So if you have the spacing set perfectly in Firefox, you may be in for a shock when you look at the same page in IE (and even IE6 and IE7 differ at times). The solution is multiple style sheets. First you make the site look good in one browser, say Firefox. Then you put in a command that tells IE6 browsers to use a different style sheet and IE7 browsers to use yet another style sheet. Finally, you create duplicate style sheets that you then tweak so each browser displays the same spacing. Yes, it's a pain to set up multiple style sheets. But before this, the only way to make everything look the same in different browsers was to create separate pages for each browser, put in browser detection, and then route each browser's request to its own page -- an even bigger pain.
Windows XP SP3 is available for download through Microsoft Update (NOT automatic updates, at least not yet), but you may not want to take advantage of this quite yet. Here's the story: XP users have been anxiously awaiting Service Pack 3 (SP3). The beta testers reported a 10% speed increase among other useful improvements. After many starts and stops, Microsoft finally released it to users. Note that there are several ways Microsoft can release updates and fixes to users:
Therefore, our advice is to wait 2-4 weeks. By that time, most of the problems will be fixed and your update will go smoothly and without glitches. Or you can wait for SP3 to be pushed out Automatic Updates. Microsoft has promised that will happen in July.
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