Combine an increase in tablet sales with the popularity of browsing the Internet from smartphones and you have a lot of potential visitors coming to your website from something other than a traditional computer.

Okay, okay, that’s all fine and good, but what does it have to do with your business? If your company has a website, it is important to know that limitations of mobile devices could make your website look and feel a little off. Grab a smartphone or tablet and check out your site. If you’re happy with how it’s rendered, great! If it’s not up to your standard, don’t freak out.

Before you invest in making your site mobile-friendly, you should first check to see if it’s worth it. If you’re one of the countless businesses using Google Analytics (free!) to track visitor activity on your site, go to Analytics ▸ Visitors ▸ Technology ▸ Browser & OS and look at your traffic sources. You will be able to tell how many of your visitors are coming from mobile devices. If that number is higher than you’re comfortable with, it may be time to ask your web developer to create a mobile version of your site. If you don’t have a web developer, Mashable has put together a nice list of tools that can help you do it yourself.

The key things to remember when making a mobile version is a reduced screen size, less processing power, and a generally slower Internet connection (sounds fun, right?). You may be comfortable having high-resolution images on your homepage, but they will take forever to download over a 3G connection and be redundant on a low-resolution screen. Many devices also don’t support flash, and many of those that do, don’t do it very well. Simple is the way to go when it comes to mobile sites.

Another thing to consider is your site navigation. It’s very common for websites to use a mouse hover that reveals extra information and/or navigation when the cursor hovers over a link. Tablets don’t have cursors which means they’re incapable of utilizing hover features. You may need to create a simpler, click-only navigation for your mobile site.

We want to hear what you think. Is mobile traffic something your business is thinking about?

Here are some useful tools you can use today to start testing and improving your website’s speed…

1. Page Speed from Google

Google started this whole conversation, so it’s only fitting that I lead with Google’s Page Speed for a website speed enhancement tool. Page Speed is an enhancement of the Firefox browser add-on an amazing tool you should already be using for any kind of web development and testing. If these two aren’t already a part of your tool belt, add them today. Page Speed with Firebug is an all-around winner, providing an in-depth analysis of your website and showing both what you’ve done right and what you’ve wrong. Effectively, this gives you a checklist of improvements that you can start making right away to your website.

2. YSlow from Yahoo

YSlow is Yahoo’s version of Page Speed, another enhancement to Firebug. Well, to be fair, YSlow has been around considerably longer than Page Speed — but that doesn’t necessarily make it better. At this time, which you use is largely a matter of personal preference. For me, it’s Page Speed, but part of that is based on whom I consider to have a better chance of improving the tool and integrating it with other tools (see #3) in the future. Even so, both provide important diagnostics and analysis, giving you a checklist of items to work toward improving your website. If you like YSlow’s interface better, or find it easier to understand, it will perform just as well.

3. Webmaster Tools from Google

Final word goes back to Google, who has integrated simple page speed analysis into a free service you may already use. That free service is Google’s Webmaster Tools, which shows you a number of useful things about your website and how it is crawled by Google. Once you’re set up with this service, the “Labs” section has a report called “Site performance”. This report shows how fast (or slow) your website happens to be, along with suggestions in the form of changes to your code that can help you create a faster experience for your visitors.

What If Search Engine Rankings Don’t Matter to Me?

Beyond search engine rankings, in fact the very reason behind Google’s decision, website speed is also a factor in how good of a visitor experience you’re providing. If your webpages take an eternity to load, you are likely frustrating your visitors. And they’re less likely to pick up the phone and dial your toll free number or shoot you an email for help, when they can simply go somewhere else. Like one of your competitor’s sites.

So even if you live on some planet where your websites search engine rankings don’t matter, you should still aim to optimize your page speed for the sake of your visitors.

Properly executed, landing pages can be highly effective at improving your website’s conversion rate, or ability to turn clicks into new business. When given the chance, I recommend consulting with a good copywriter and designer for maximum benefit.

Here are the four basic elements you should look to include when building your own landing pages…

1. Attention-Grabbing Headlines
The headline is the first thing your visitors will see on your landing page and it sets up the page for the rest of your message. Headlines should be strong, descriptive, and align with the language found on the ad or link your visitors clicked to reach your website.

2. A Strong Call to Action
The call to action should be in an obvious place and be easy to find. It should be larger than other buttons as well as a brighter color to stand out. Button copy is also important, and should tell the visitor what they should expect to happen when they click the button.

3. Captivating Copy
Your body copy should be clear, to the point, and support the landing page’s call to action while summarizing key points with bullets. Credible testimonials can also be a great trust-builder that can get visitors to take action.

4. Overall Flow of Design
The design of your landing page should have a clean layout, appropriate stacking order of information, and plenty of whitespace. The page’s focus needs to be on getting your visitor to take action. Your graphics, images, video, etc., should be used to emphasize important elements. All unnecessary distractions should be removed. Keep it simple!

Taking the Next Step
The four key elements above just scratch the surface of landing page design and optimization, but I consider them good blocks to build on when you’re just getting started. For a more in depth reference, I recommend  grabbing your copy of this amazing book on Landing Page Optimization by Tim Ash. The information and tips found in this book will help you take your landing pages to the next level.

This quick, free, and effective tool helps you set up tests that distribute new visitors to your old and new pages and track how effective each is at getting your customers to complete an action on your website. Whether that’s filling out a lead form, downloading a report, subscribing to your service, or placing an order – you’ll know which version of your website does more for getting you new business.

Creating Your Website Optimizer Account

If you don’t already have a Google Account for services like AdWords, Analytics, or Webmaster Tools, you’ll need to create one. If you do already have a Google Account, you can log in here and answer a couple quick questions to add Website Optimizer to your account. Once you get signed in and have your alternate pages ready, it’s time to create your first test, or ”experiment,” as Google calls it.

Creating an A/B or “Split” Test

There are two options for testing models: A/B and multivariate testing. A/B testing involves testing two or more different pages (even if they’re mostly identical), whereas multivariate testing allows you to test a large number of elements on a given page. Multivariate testing requires a lot of data (hits to your website) to generate results, and is a little more challenging to implement, so beginners should start with A/B testing.

Setting up your test takes three steps: providing your page URLs, installing your JavaScript tags, and then verifying proper installation. In the first step, you name your experiment and provide the URLs of your test pages and the “conversion” page, or where visitors coming through any test page need to reach to be considered a success. Two things to remember: the more variations you try to test with A/B testing, the longer your experiment will take, and all variations are measured strictly against the original and not each other, like a game of Blackjack.

In the second step, you’ll need to add some JavaScript tags to the code of each page involved in the test. These tags are what cause your test pages to rotate between new visitors and flag successes when they occur. To install these tags, Google gives you two options: install them yourself if you know how, or get a link that you can send to someone else so they can do the installation. Finally, Google will verify that your tags are properly installed and you’re ready to begin your experiment.

Once launched, there are a couple more notable options at your disposal. First, you can choose your percentage of traffic to use for testing. The default is 100%, but you can set this lower to minimize the short-term risk of testing unproven pages. The trade-off is that your testing is going to take longer to produce results. Second, you can choose to auto-disable losing variations to speed up testing. You set a threshold below which losing variations are automatically removed from the test, allowing more website traffic to go to the remaining pages. Even if you don’t select this option, you’re not stuck sending visitors to clear losers – you can still manually disable losing variations at any time. Once you’re satisfied with your experiment setup, sit back and watch the data pour in day by day.

When Should I Stop My Test?

Google Website Optimizer uses a statistical method for determining each variation page’s chance to beat the original version. You’ll be able to see each page’s conversion rate, plus or minus a range of testing variability, and how that stacks up with the original. This range is shown also as a color-coded bar in a box graph. Any overlap is grey – it tells you nothing. If there is some overlapping and some not, the part that isn’t will be colored yellow - meaning you need more data for definitive results. When there is no overlap between between a variation’s conversion rate range and the original page’s conversion rate range, the bar will either turn red (loser) or green (winner).

If you’re testing several pages, red variations should be disabled as they appear in order to allow more traffic to go to the remaining pages. Once you’ve arrived at a green bar winner, it’s time to conclude your experiment. Click on “Stop” on the experiment report, and you’ll be prompted to either choose a winning variation and continue with it exclusively or set up a follow-up experiment if you had several potential winners that you’d like to run on a more narrow test.

The hardest part of knowing when to stop a test is in the case where you aren’t getting conclusive results. If you’ve received a high volume of visits (several thousand) and your variations are still neck-and-neck with the original, you may need to re-evaluate your testing. If there’s something more worthwhile for you to test, don’t be afraid to end an experiment for being inconclusive and move on.

The Next Step

Once you get the hang of testing, you can branch out to using multivariate design instead of A/B testing to get quicker and more thorough results. For further reading, my favorite book written on Google Website Optimizer is Always Be Testing by Bryan Esienberg and John Quarto-vonTivadar. The ideas and inspiration contained therein are sure to keep you busy with finding ways to fine-tune your website. Also, be sure to check out the Google Website Optimizer Blog for the latest news and tips on how to get the most out of your testing!

Next Week’s Website Improvement Topic: Landing Page Optimization!

Bring carrots.

In last week’s installment of this segment on using heatmaps, I mentioned that live user technology was expensive. In general, this is true – any time you’re involving live people in your testing, you have to willing to pay them for their time. And, well, people can be expensive. But there are affordable solutions out there that have flipped this idea on its head by making it simple for businesses and website testers to come together. Today I’m going to shamelessly talk up my personal favorite of these services, with which I’ve been continually impressed:

UserTesting.com

UserTesting.com is exactly what it professes to be, “low cost usability testing.” For $29 a tester (lower if you prepay), you get matched up with well-screened users that, from the comfort of their own computer, will visit your site and record their audio and visual experience.

Getting started is very easy – you provide your website URL, a “scenario” that describes the typical mindset of your visitors, what “tasks” the users should try to accomplish in about 15 minutes of using your website, and how many users you want. If it helps you, you can specify demographics for your users such as gender, age, country, household income, and level of computer savvy. You can even specify a particular user if they’ve performed well for you on past tests.

What You Get Back

Within a couple hours, you can log in and start watching your videos of users navigating your website and articulating their thoughts. They’ll narrate exactly what they’re reading and why, why they’re clicking on certain things, what catches their attention, and what, if anything, raises red flags or confuses them. There are also text summaries available, breaking down into concise points what users like and don’t like about their experience with your website.

The idea is that you get actionable data – thoughts, feelings, and experiences of real live humans that tried to do something on your website. With this information, you can start to identify trends and make changes like fixing places where multiple users get lost or confused, reworking buttons that to you seem obvious but everyone seems to miss, or making your hidden toll free number more visible.

5 Tips on Successful Usability Testing

1. Invest in a good number of users. Less than three users is probably not going to do you much good. A single person might respond negatively to a certain aspect of your website that to everyone else likes. The name of the game with website usability testing is trends, and trends require several unique experiences. Dig a little bit deeper into your wallet and you’ll get a lot more return on your investment.

2. Don’t take it personally. I’ve met a handful of web designers that despise usability testing, reacting to users’ negative feedback with quips like, “they’re not web designers, they don’t know what they’re talking about.” That’s neither constructive nor remotely relevant. The people that use your website day-to-day aren’t web designers either (unless that’s your audience).

3. Don’t overreact. Too often with any kind of testing, first-time users respond to the results by making sweeping changes to every little thing they can. Move slow, start with things that are most obvious from the results, areas of concern or dislike that are shared by several users. You can become more picky with future tests, once you have a feel for it.

4. Give your own feedback. On UserTesting.com, you can rate the quality of your users on a 5-star scale and leave a description if you want. Don’t underestimate the value of this feature. By rating users, you’re helping the service keep its pool of users strong. If there are some users that are more helpful than others (and that doesn’t just mean nicer), remember them for your next test.

5. Shop multiple usability services. I’ve made no secret about it – I’m a fan of UserTesting.com for being quick, affordable, and thorough – but there are countless other solutions out there for website usability testing. I’d wager others are probably going to cost you more in both dollars and hours, but you may find what you get back is worth the extra investment.

Next Week’s Website Improvement Topic: Google’s Website Optimizer!