Quality Management ROI Calculator - Focus on Test Automation
The Rational Quality Management ROI calculator is intended to give you an idea of what return you can garner from implementing our functional testing solutions. Our quality management solutions offer tools to develop a continuous process, powered by automation to govern software delivery.
» Gartner MarketScope: Application Quality Management Solutions, 1Q 08
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» Whitepaper: Tips for Writing Good Use Cases
Writing a good use case isnt easy, but, fortunately, our experience can be your guide. The concepts and principles assembled here represent the works of many people at IBM, and they form a foundation of proven best practices.
» Whitepaper: The Role of Integrated Requirements Management in Software Delivery
Learn about the critical role integrated requirements management can play in helping ensure your business goals and IT projects are continuously aligned-whether you are sourcing, integrat-ing, building or maintaining your software. It also looks at ways that integration and automation can help ensure managing projects and the required changes can be executed using manageable processes that satisfy stakeholders and development teams.
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There's only one sure-fire way to build substantial site
traffic over the long run, and that is to make your site as
useful as possible. Although content is king, your
navigational scheme also has a lot to do with how useful your
site is. One of the main reasons people leave a site after
only a few seconds is because they can't find what they're
looking for, or are forced to click through page after page
to get to the content. See my previous WDVL article
(
Nav 101)
on navigation for hints on how to build a logical,
user-friendly layout.
My recent article on
Traffic Tips from your Log Files
also makes a good companion article to this one. Analyzing
your log files can tell you a lot about the paths people take
once they reach your site, and point out areas that could be
improved.
To some extent, your navigational scheme will depend on the
purpose of your Web site. Back in the good old days of course
(2 or 3 years ago), the only purpose a site needed was to
share information, but nowadays, in any discussion of site
goals and purposes, the question of a "business model" will
rear its head. This trendy term basically means "How do you
expect to make your money?" Now, there may be endless ways to
make money on the Internet, but for the purposes of this
article, we'll assume that you're either selling a product or
service, or that you're selling ads on the site. Of course,
some sites do both, but the navigational implications of
these two business models differ, so it makes sense to discuss
them separately.
If you're selling a product or service, then your goal is to
get the visitor to click on the button that authorizes a
transaction, in other words, to buy something. Your whole site
exists to guide the visitor to that point, so you don't really
care much what other sections of the site they visit, how many
pages they see, or whatever. If they come straight from a
search engine to the ordering page, hand over their bucks and
split, that's fine.
Of course, this doesn't mean you want to herd them blindly to
the order button. There is such a thing as informing your
customers, and in many cases, the longer they spend perusing
your product information, the more likely they'll be to choose
just the right model, see how much better your product is than
the competition, be impressed with your professional-looking
Web site, etc. etc. So include plenty of good-quality content
on your site (well-organized, of course), but make sure that
order button is right there for those who are ready to click
it. Don't make visitors click through a million pages to get
to the checkout counter. From every page on your site, the
ordering page should never be more than one click away.
To sum up, owners of e-commerce sites are more concerned with
their "conversion rate" (the percentage of visitors who are
converted to customers) than with the number of page
impressions generated.
For an ad-supported site, the traffic goals are a bit
different. Since ads are sold by the impression (Each time an
ad image is shown to a visitor is one "impression.), every
page view may be a couple of pennies in the bank. While an
e-commerce site wants to send everyone to the order page, an
ad-supported site wants to send each visitor to as many
different pages as possible. In this sense, an e-commerce site
should be designed like a funnel, and an ad-supported site
like a maze.
Now, by invoking a maze, I don't mean to imply that it should
be hard for people to find what they want. On the contrary,
not only should it be easy for visitors to zero in on exactly
the type of content they're looking for, but they should be
presented with lots of opportunities to check out
closely-related content, so they keep clicking off to explore
ever-more-fascinating new worlds, the page impressions keep
racking up, and the cyber-cash register rings!
Later in this article, we'll discuss how to maximize traffic
with internal links.
Navigation that Works
Nothing chases away visitors faster than a dysfunctional site.
Dead links, errors, long page load times, fancy scripts that
don't work as they're supposed to...Each of these incidents is
a penny out of your pocket. Nay more, because once someone
has encountered more than one or two errors on your site,
they will probably never return.
No matter how careful you are when working on pages, bad
links can creep in, so use a tool like LinkBot
( see
WebDevelopersJournal Linkbot Pro Review),
which automatically searches your site and tells you of any
bad links. Also, just in case, you should have a custom error
page on your site. Set up your Web server so that if anyone
requests a page that doesn't exist, they are automatically
redirected to your error page. The error page contains links
to your home page and major sections, your search feature,
and the Webmaster's email address. When a visitor arrives at
the error page, chances are good they'll stay on your site and
try to find what they were looking for. If they just get a
generic "404 - Page not found" message, they'll disappear.
One of the biggest problems for e-commerce sites is ordering
scripts that simply don't work. Okay, online retail is still
fairly new, and a certain amount of chaos is to be expected,
but it's appalling to see how many sites, including some of
the big names, use fancy-shmancy scripting that crashes half
the time. Again, when a script fails to work (or worse yet,
locks up the visitor's whole system), not only do you lose
that particular sale, but you may permanently lose the
respect of a potential customer. Make sure all your scripts
have been thoroughly tested, with a variety of browser
versions and operating systems.
Quality Management ROI Calculator - Focus on Test Automation
