I want to perform A/B testing and we have a lot of dynamic pages on our website. Is there any best A/B testing tool that can handle this situation? Thanks for the help
Any A/B testing tool, including the free ones, are meant to work with dymanic pages. The world would be a sad place if all you could test were one static page against another.
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We're building a new website design and instead of cutting over to it 100%, we'd like to ease into it so we can test as we go. The goal would be to have users that visit http://oursite.com to either get the "old" website or the new, and we could control the percentage of who gets the new site by 10%, 50%, etc.
I'm familiar with A/B tests for pages, but not an entire website domain. We're on a LAMP stack so maybe this can be done with Apache VHosts? We have 2 cloud servers running behind a cloud load balancer in production. The new site is entirely contained in an svn branch and the current production site runs out of the svn trunk.
Any recommendations on how I can pull this off?
Thanks you!
You absolutely can do this, and it's a great way to quickly identify things that make a big difference in improving conversion rates. It's dependent on a couple of things:
Your site has a common header. You'll be A/B testings CSS files, so this will only work if there's a single CSS call for the entire site (or section of the site).
You're only testing differences in site design. In this scenario all content, forms, calls to action, etc. would be identical between the versions. It is technically possible to run separate tests on other page elements concurrently. I don't recommend this as interpretation of results gets confusing.
The A/B testing platform that you choose supports showing the same version to a visitor throughout their visit. It would be pretty frustrating to see a site's theme change every time they hit another page. Most A/B testing platforms that I've used have an option for this.
Since you're testing substantial differences between versions, I also recommend that you calculate sample sizes before you begin. This will keep you from showing the losing version to too many people, and it will also give you confidence in the results (it's a mistake to let tests run until they reach statistical significance). There are a couple of online calculators that you can use (VisualWebsiteOptimizer, Evan Miller).
I’m working on a project (one I’ve inherited) with one main website for the purposes of gathering contact information from potential customers and a collection of sub sites which serve the same purpose. Each of these sites has a different design and each one is served from a separate directory under the document root directory. Each of these sub sites is also served from the same URL as the main site with a different directory specified in the URL for each one of these subsites, e.g. “http://www.example.com/subsite/”.
The problem as it is now is that our web designers have to make manual changes to the HTML in each of the files for these sub sites whenever a change is needed. Ideally, they would like to be able to manage these sites and make changes to them in a more rapid way and without having to make manual changes to something like 60+ sites each containing potentially 10-15 pages of HTML.
I’ve been doing research into various solutions and I’m not sure which would be the best to manage something like this. These sites are all built in PHP and I’ve been looking into CMS solutions such as Drupal, SilverStripe, and MODX but I’m not certain if they would meet our needs. I don’t have a lot of experience working with a CMS so I’m hoping someone with more experience can provide some insight. Any suggestions anyone can make regarding how best to handle something like this are greatly appreciated.
If I’ve left out any information that might be helpful/necessary in someone providing advice just let me know.
Any CMS will do what you need.
If I've understood well every subsite share the same domain, but only resides in a subdirectory.
For example with MODX you could define different templates with specific design for every subsite.
All subsites however could share some chunks (html code) or snippets (php code), so that a change in shared things applies to all subsites.
You can easily migrate the exisiting design to MODX:
http://codingpad.maryspad.com/2009/03/28/building-a-website-with-modx-for-newbies-part-1-introduction/
and find the additional pieces you need:
http://modx.com/extras/
Now I have to pick a template and jump thru bunch of loops to create a page that I don't like. So we wonder if it's possible to just drop a few web pages and the css that we created on our own as our web site on Google Apps, doable?
AFAIK, that is not possible. I made a google site for a client last year, and it takes a lot of hoops to go through for customization. You can do quite a bit, it might not be readily noticeable. I found googling the things I wanted to do tended to yield the quickest results.
hello supersmart stackoverflow users!
Im wondering.. is there any software or tool (web based or otherwise) that helps and streamlines the whole technical and functional specification writing process so that we as developers/website can sit with clients, assess what they want to create/achieve and write up the spec efficiently and easily so that when its approved it can easily be passed onto the webdev people and they can create what is set out in the specification?
Thank you in advance!
Specfox is a SaaS designed just for that. You upload the screens (layouts or screen grabs), add notes and pinpoint to page elements, and generate PDFs to share with copywriters, designers and developers, or whoever you need to involve. It was the best online website specifications tool I found for a website redesign we did.
If you're still looking, take a look at Axure. It's built just for this. It's awesome
This is a question about the development workflow of front end engineers. I am starting a project for a rather large site with lots of pages, each page has multiple steps, and it's very difficult to lay out all the content in a spreadsheet.
The content of each page will be delivered in a spreadsheet cell, and some pages have multiple variable section that are determined by user's preferences.
I was asked my opinion about how to structure the deliverable. I am wondering if there is a best practice out there for structuring this kind of deliverable? Because when you have a poorly structured deliverable it can be almost as mindnumbing as using pen-and-pencil to write code.
Do you have any tools, formats, practices for creating deliverables that are easy to work with?
It sounds like you are just doing the UI design and then giving it to the front-end engineers.
If that is correct, I would suggest that you see if you can do the rough html/css work to get the page to look as you want, and then they can go in and give it the functionality, but that way you have an idea what is possible.
You can do much of the work, then leave comments about trying to center something a bit better, for example.
I am not a big fan of just getting the design on paper or as an image, it would be easier to just get the html/css.
There are plenty of tools now that make css and html easy to do, even if you have the css inside the html, they can separate the two, but, it would be a huge help to the designers.
Just do one page, and give it to them, and then come back in a day or two and get feedback as to what their thoughts are, and how you can improve what you give them.
As you go through this process, after a while both groups will know what to expect and you can get the rest done quickly.
This is more of an agile methodology with the front-end engineers as your customers.
My suggestion would be mockups or wireframes for the pages. Mockups would be examples of the pages in various states while the wireframe is a detailed document of the structure of the page.
HTML and CSS is way too complicated for mockup use. I usually first create a requirement backlog for UI/functionalities as well (just a list of priorized reqs in Excel).
Especially for a large site development you should also have the process and data flow definitions done (UML or other way of description) to help you define the mentioned requirements.
Based on these you will know what kind of steps does the whole site funcionality need (i.e. pages) and what the page hierarchy and structure will be like. This way it's much easier to get a grasp of the whole thing.
After that we'll create fast wireframes and visualize the end result with fast mockups done as images with Photoshop or similar. These are absolutely vital in my experience as it helps the customer (and other stakeholders) to actually understand what is beind done. For this the html and css are simply too slow to run multiple iterations with.