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We’ve been using Optimizely for several months now to A/B test new ideas and features on Cash4Books.net. It’s been useful for us to test things like:

• Above the fold content changes (tagline tweaks, for example, regarding our FREE shipping).
• Different button colors and sizes.
• Placement and rearrangement of various items above the fold (TV commercial, versus media mentions, versus special one time offers, versus testimonials, and so on).
• Size and placement of the ISBN box.
• Affiliate info placement and banners.
• Marketing promotions.  Want to know if that Cash4Books giveaway actually increases engagement and transactions?  Now we know!
• New features.  Want to know if price matching or offering a guarantee will increase transactions? Now we know!

When you start setting up your tests, what it is actually doing behind the scenes is creating a jQuery script. This script runs on page load, and modifies your variation pages on the fly.  It’s a cool setup, and as the title of this blog post says, I’ve found that it works best if you know jQuery. I happen to have a fair amount of experience with jQuery, so it’s made Optimizely a better experience for me.  If someone was just using the WYSIWYG editor, it may not be as good of an end result, and the code Optimizely produces can be hairball-ish, if you’re not in the code editor watching what it’s doing.

And, the price of all this?  I’d say it’s fair and reasonable.  For a set price, you are allotted so much traffic to pass through your A/B test.  If you start going over your allotment you can either upgrade to the next package, or pay a small per-visitor overage fee.

Here are three things I personally love about Optimizely:

1. A lot of options on targeting are available.  You can run your test for all, new, or returning visitors. There are also a lot of options for what URL will trigger the test.  This adds a lot of flexibility. It can be very simple, or as complex as you want it.
2. Cross browser testing component is pretty awesome.  They’ve partnered with crossbrowsertesting.com and you can test all your variations before they go live.  It even shows you how it looks on mobile.
3. Experiment goals is very flexible.  I’ve set up goals to track revenue, if they’ve reached certain pages, submitted a transaction, registered, clicked certain buttons, and so on.  Pretty much any goal you can think of is possible.

Here’s some info from Optimizely’s website:

Say goodbye to technical bottlenecks and hello to actionable data

When its time to take action and make changes to your site, there is no replacement for dedicated technical resources – in most organizations, these resources are hard to come by and typically demand waiting in line. Optimizely acts as your on-demand technical team, with technology that turns your creative changes into instantly generated and deployed code.

Bring thousands of optimization ideas to life in minutes

After inserting a single line of code generated by Optimizely into your HTML, you never have to touch the code base again – from there, you have instant testing capability, and any variation you create can be live to your visitors within minutes.

Track what matters to you

Track engagement, clicks, conversions, sign ups, or anything else that matter to you and your business. Optimizely’s custom goal tracking provides an endless range of measurable actions that you can define. Just tell Optimizely what to measure, and we will do the rest.

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99 Designs is a great place to get a design that you’ll love, and save a bundle of money.  We’ve used them two times now. Once for a t-shirt design and another time for a web design mockup.  Both times we were thoroughly impressed.  Many designers will compete on the same project, and all for a fixed flat price–not by the hour.  We love seeing different ideas and perspectives from many different designers.  The designers are motivated to deliver their best work because only the winner gets awarded the money. We rated and commented the ones we liked and received even more revisions from the designers.  It’s a great process, and ultimately we ended up with very polished designs both times we used them.  We were very happy with the end products.  Here’s some info from their site:

What is 99designs?

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The leadership team at Cash4Books.net had recognized for a while that our annual review form needed a makeover. We didn’t like the 3-4 page format… no one did. The format went back to a template that a former “HR Professional” had brought into the company from a previous employer. It just didn’t fit us well. I take the blame on that one–we should have created a custom annual review form that fit our company culture.

As the leadership team had been reading The Advantage by Lencioni, we wanted to make sure we took some next steps and put the concepts of the book into action while it was still fresh in our minds. The annual review form makeover was the first step we took.

And, the annual review form makeover started with CORE VALUES. Why? Because our core values must integrate into everything. From hiring, reviews, teams, meetings, how we act under various circumstances, and so on. They are not just something we hang on a wall or post to an intranet page… we will actually use them.

In other words, the new annual review form literally now has a section for each core value. And, it was vastly simplified. One page, double sided. Reviews will be filled out based on the core values of the company. There will not be a “grade” assigned, but rather a “frequency”. For example, how frequently is ____ core value exhibited by George?

I announced to the company a while ago that we can boil our five core values down to TWO:

• Commit to Service Excellence
• Improve Continuously

Lencioni made a VERY compelling case in the book that we take the time to re-think our other three. Our other three were: Be Honest, Celebrate, and Make a Difference.

Part of the process of re-thinking our other three was to consider the character traits of our current AND former rock star employees. Former being people that we would hire back in a heart beat if we could.

We also considered the character traits of people that were rejected from the company culture. Vomited out of the company, if you will. Everything was listed out in a long process on the whiteboard.

Reworking our core values is not something I took lightly. The leadership team spent some time reflecting on this, and making sure it was the right decision for us.  We had originally used principles in the book Built To Last by Collins to form our original five core values. The great thing was that Lencioni references Collins’ work several times, and does a great job at building and improving off of his work.

The bottom line is that we ended up with FOUR core values. These four were used in our new annual review form. We revealed the new two core values and their definitions as:

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Click to Visit oDesk.com

A great deal of money can be saved by outsourcing your web development to freelancers.  This article builds off of my previous post, How to Hire on oDesk – Eight Tips for Small Business Owners. I have over 10 years experience building many web applications, including cash4books.net, gamerevive.com, mkzbooks.com, and sellbooksdirect.com. If you are looking to hire freelance web developers (AKA web programmers), one of the most important first steps is writing the detailed requirements document for your web application. It defines the scope of the project, and makes it very clear WHAT you are building.  But, it does not address HOW it will be built (a design document would do that).  A clear and detailed requirements document will set your project up for success for your outsourced web development project, and it will save you money by not having to go back and redo parts of the project that were not well defined.  And, if you haven’t figured it out, oDesk is my recommended solution for finding the best freelance web developers.

I prefer to use a Google Docs for writing the requirements.  First, set up the following outline. For your convenience, I created a detailed requirements document template to get you started.  Just open it and go to File–>Make a copy. Then start filling it in.  You’ll need a Google account, of course.  Or, if you want to use Word or something else, here is the outline:

1. Summary of Functionality
2. Definitions
3. CSS, logo, and design of site
4. Header, navigation, and footer
5. SEO
6. Customer Facing Pages
7. Flow Chart
8. CRUD operations (create, read, update, delete)
9. Admin Panel
10. Roles and Security
11. Reporting
12. Form Validation and Error Messages
13. Logging
14. Usability
15. Email Alerts
16. Mobile
17. Installation
18. Maintenance
19. Q&A from Job Post
20. Optional: Video Walkthrough of Competitor Sites

For the hardcore software requirements writers, the first critique will be that I’m not recommending usage of UML. Though I’m academically trained in UML, I don’t think it is necessary for the average business owner to use when building out the requirements for the average outsourced web project. That said, it really depends on the size of the project. Larger, and more expensive, projects can benefit from a more rigorous UML based approach.

Back to the Google Doc… Be sure to use “heading 2″ for the high level outline. This way, you can use the table of contents feature at the top of your Google Doc, and you can refresh it and create links to your content.

When writing out the content, use the word “must” instead of “should” in your requirements.  For example, say “The navigation must have x, y, z”. Watch my video for more tips on how to fill in the content from here:

Thanks, and please let me know if my post has been helpful to you by leaving a comment below.

Jim McKenzie Smith
President, CEO
McKenzie Books, Inc.
Cash4Books.net