We track a lot of information with Google Analytics. Goal conversion rates, e-commerce revenues, adword campaigns, search keywords, referrers and so on. Collecting information is easy, but trying to make sense of it can be frustrating.

Google wants me to drown in a sea of data

I often find myself wandering through the Google Analytics reports, marveling at the shiny graphs or noting with curiosity that the middle of the month is always slower. While my intellectual curiosity might be satisfied, I’m still left confused, unsure about which variable to tweak and nothing to act on.

I eventually learned that, like Ulysses who tied himself to the mast to resist the alluring chants of Sirens, diving into the reports requires self-discipline and focus. First identify a specific page, then a metric, write it down and do not look at anything else.  Then go and try to improve it.

Another thing I learned is that you can’t just compare the performance of a page before and after a change and decide whether the change was a good idea or not.

Traffic is not a constant. It varies over time, quite significantly. One week the conversion rate is great, and the next one it sucks even though nothing changed on the site. Perhaps it’s a surge of unqualified visitors, or people who get antsy over the latest economic news, or just a random fluke.

I’m not willing to wait days or weeks for a clear pattern to emerge. If my new page is not performing as well, I’d like to  undo my mistake as quickly as possible.

That’s where A/B testing is really useful. It works by randomly splitting your incoming traffic between 2 different versions of a same page. With the appropriate tracking tool, it’s then very easy to see which page performs better.

Google the merciful rewards the faithful

So I finally decided to take a second look at Google’s Website Optimizer, a free A/B testing service.  I wasn’t convinced the first time around. It was rather limited, and I thought that our esteemed visitors would not be swayed one way or another just because we make our marketing copy a bit more clever. After all, we firmly believe in the greatness of the product we’re building,  shouldn’t it just sell by itself?

Well, it turns out that Website Optimizer got a lot better. It’s very easy to set up, you can test pretty much anything and it provides unambiguous results quickly.

No more trying to decipher the reports and understand what’s going on. No more agonizing over a design decision. Should it be a link or a button? Should it say ‘Sign up now’ or ‘Try it for Free’? Just try both and let Google tell you which one works best.

And when the result  is a 300% improvement in conversion rate, I sure feel stupid for not doing it sooner.

I’m not going to criticize this approach but I honestly thought there would be more young entrepreneurs in the Valley interested in emulating companies like Salesforce or 37signals.

It is quite ironic that David Heinemeier Hansson is seen as going against the grain, when his presentation was packed with nothing but grounded advice and a healthy dose of common sense. What’s wrong with the old true and tested way of charging money for your service?

Interestingly, DHH also said that Backback (37signals’ second app after Basecamp), had to be rebranded and relaunched as a “business” application when they realized that the consumer market wasn’t really profitable.

There was maybe one theme missing from the picture though. Building a successful business takes time and hard work. A lot of time and a lot of work, so it was great to meet you all, I have to go back to work now.

The On-Site edition offers the same great features enjoyed by thousands of our online users, but you can run it on your own server and keep your data safe and private.

FormAssembly On-Site is a reliable and secure solution designed to work on the most widely available configurations: Windows or Unix, IIS or Apache, and with any of the major database vendors. The support for such a wide range of technologies is made possible by the great open-source framework FormAssembly is built upon.

You can learn more about FormAssembly On-Site at http://onsite.formassembly.com

Several commenters have pointed out that @importRule would not be that useful since you can already assign more than one CSS class to an element.

However, having (apparently) some time to waste this morning, I thought it would be interesting to implement this pseudo css rule anyway.

Here’s the example page, with a short explanation of the (very simplistic) javascript:

Again, I’m not claiming that this is very useful, but if one wanted to create a javascript css post-processor, that would be a good way to start.

After months of work, the new FormAssembly.com is nearing completion.

This new version is a complete re-write, and since it is hosted on a completely separate platform, we are looking forward to a very smooth transition, with the two versions running concurrently for as long as necessary.

The feedback from the early beta-testers is pretty good. There are also plenty of new (and long requested) features, so I’m confident that our users will be happy with the new version.

I will also look at the traffic and conversion numbers attentively anxiously. In theory, the new site should perform much better, but sometimes what sells is really not what you think, so it will be interesting to compare the numbers. I’ll try to post my findings here.

A simple demonstration is available here, with all the explanations here.

Version 2.1 includes bug fixes and performance improvements. The major changes are:

• Upgraded to latest version of Sarissa (0.9.7.6)
• XSL stylesheet should now set the XSL utput method to “HTML”. This prevents an unnecessary HTML serialization & parsing step and avoids invalid HTML markup altogether, like self-closing <textarea/>. While this change makes 2.1 not backward compatible, this should be the only required change if you are using Freja 2.0.

I also updated the documentation and tutorials, which were beginning to be seriously out-of-date.

The Freja core development team is comprised of Cedric Savarese and Troels Knak-Nielsen. Freja is an Open-Source framework built on top of the Sarissa library by Manos Batsis.

This is still very experimental, but as you can see in the article, there are some clear benefits in terms of accessibility and speed when using XUL for complex UI widgets.

Check out the documentation and source for this experimental library and thanks to all for the feedback.

This time, I was thinking about the interface for the next version of the Form Builder (I know, somehow it’s always work related) and I was wondering if XUL could be of any help here.

A couple days later, I had this working: tabbed panel example.

If you are not using the Firefox browser, you will not see anything interesting, so here’s a screenshot of the second panel, viewed in Firefox (XUL powered).

The first panel in the example uses HTML+Javascript (a.k.a DHTML). It is very basic, there are better DHTML panel widgets of course. The idea is that you could enhance an existing javascript UI library to render widgets with XUL on XUL-compatible browsers…

You can check out the source code if you want to see how it’s done.

Update: As whoughton pointed out, it doesn’t degrades to DHTML as it should in Safari. I will fix that soon, it’s probably not a serious bug.

Update 2: The problem in Safari is caused by its user-agent. To detect whether I should render with XUL or DHTML, I look at the user-agent string. If it contains the word “gecko”, I assume the browser uses the Gecko rendering engine and therefore supports XUL… Well it turns out Safari’s user-agent string includes “Gecko” even though it’s not based on Gecko at all. Weird. Anyway, I’ll just have to fix the detection code.

Update 3. It’s fixed in Safari, thanks to Boris tips.

While reading State of Denial, I came accross the following quote regarding how a CEO should allocate his or her time.

“…one third of the time on top priorities, one third on executive placement and development and the final third on evaluating the product or results.”

Had I gone through a MBA this could have sound like old news, but to me, it felt like I had just unearthed the secret rule of time management.

Obviously, I don’t have to worry about finding and managing executive people but even a small independant internet company owner needs to spend time on developing personal relationships with its customers, partners and advisors. The rewritten rule could be:

The entrepreneur’s schedule

• 1/3: Top Priorities
• 1/3: Networking, sales and support
• 1/3: Measuring progress

Let’s just say that I think I get the first one right.