Neville's Digital Surrogate Brain
My main goal in my learning Flash phase is to learn how to create interactive objects. This is a first run trial of just that:
Pretty basic and simple stuff, but such a small effect can be very useful in more serious applications. I’m still learning Flash, and I’ve gotta say, it’s pretty fun!
Also, if any of my sites start acting a little funky this coming weekend it’s because I’m transferring to a new, upgraded server.
Learning Photoshop has brought me lots of value (and money), and I think it’s much past due that I learn how to use Flash.
I can sssoooorrrrrt of use Flash right now as seen in my crude re-creation of my accident. I was also able to quickly pick up Swish which is what I might use from now on.
I’m not looking to become an expert in this, but I want to be able to regularly incorporate Flash into different projects. I can already make simplified little movies, but I want to learn how to use Action Script which is the programming language behind Flash (from what I understand). My end goal is to make small Flash files which react to mouse movement. Like when you roll your mouse over an area, it reacts in a certain way, or makes other objects in the file react. Shouldn’t be that tough.
As for now I’m starting to get re-acquainted with Flash, and this is my first little experiment with it:
That’s just from playing around a bit. I need to start learning how to properly use more advanced features. Both Flash and Swish have tutorials included in the software, perhaps those would be a good start. There’s also a massive amount of free flash tutorials out there (Google it), but has anyone had luck with a particular one?
I’ve given myself a reasonable time line to get familiar with making customized Flash modules: Two weeks. So come 5-22-2008 I should have some crude example of a interactive Flash file posted here.
HouseOfRave has thousands of registered users on the mailing list and yet I’ve never sent out a newsletter or mass mailing with new products, news yadda yadda. It seems I’m missing out on a decently large opportunity here (well, I sent a ghetto one before which was a total disaster).
I’ll be using Vertical Response to send out this upcoming newsletter as I’ve had some experience with it before. Today I designed, wrote and formatted the pictures for the upcoming newsletter.
I’m actually waiting to send this email blast for a little while, because coming up on May 22, 2008 Vertical Response is having a free workshop @ the Driskill in Austin which will teach a bunch of tips, tricks and recommendations for email marketing. I’ll be going if anyone here in Austin wants to join me for the free food workshop.
Anyhow, currently this is what I’ve come up with for the Newsletter:
It looks a little plain, but hey, it’s only the first day I’ve worked on it. I also have a feeling the final product that goes out will look much different than this initial composite.
I’m sure the upcoming workshop will have a bunch of recommendations on what works and what doesn’t. I’ve heard little tips like giving away a 15% of coupon in the email is good, but it never works good as offering free shipping….little things like that can make or break a campaign (so I hear).
I’ll be sending this initial test email to 4,000 registered customers, and it’s crazy to think of that percentage wise.
I’m wondering if that’s just wishful thinking, or if this email marketing stuff really works that well. Anyone here had any success with it?
A few days ago I setup HouseOfRave to send an XML feed to Google, now to further expand HoR’s reach I’ve submitted a product feed of 350 HouseOfRave products to Yahoo.
I had to format the product list myself since my software doesn’t automatically do it, but Yahoo makes it simple, so anyone relatively familiar with Excel could figure it out.
For BodyMonkey.com I use Yahoo Stores, so all my products are automatically listed on the Yahoo Shopping network. That business is rarely updated yet still makes some orders solely from Yahoo Shopping Network listings.
What I like about the Yahoo Shopping Network is that when people click your product, they are usually ready to buy. However since HouseOfRave is not hosted on Yahoo Stores, I’m curious to see the actual buying habits.
Unlike Google’s Froogle, inclusion in the Yahoo Shopping network costs money. I added $50 to my pay-per-click account and am anxious to see the results in the coming month. If an investment of $50 brings in <$50 in profit I wouldn't have had before, then the campaign will be a success and I'll increase my Yahoo spending. If not, lesson learned.
I recently wrote about improving the shopping cart layout and flow for HouseOfRave, and it’s definitely much better than it used to be.
I added upon that and started making new checkout buttons that stay congruent with the main site. Previously all the buttons looked like this:
There was nothing really wrong with the buttons, but they didn’t fit the color scheme of the site very well. I went ahead and re-designed some of the buttons to appear like this:
The changed buttons were basically transposed from the “Add to cart” and “View Cart” buttons customers see on all the products.
MAIN CHECKOUT BUTTONS:
Now I realize the “Continue Shopping” and “Checkout” button have not been changed. I actually DID change them, but reverted them back. I’m trying to make the buttons congruent with the site, but that was the problem, the new buttons blended in too well with the site. I think the checkout button should stand out a little more, and I’m still trying to find/make a good one. Even Noah commented on this saying checkout buttons should stand out.
I do like how it looks at the moment. The “Remove” “Empty Cart” and “Recalculate” buttons are routine user operations, and the associated buttons look completely different from the main site functions (Continue Shopping and Checkout”).
An extra backend function that was added to the site courtesy of the recent Shopsite upgrade is I can track user store searches. So whenever people search for something, I see the results in the backend. This feature was just implemented this feature very recently so there’s not much data yet, but it’s another metric I can use to improve the overall ease of use for House Of Rave.
Today for improving HoR I added a bunch of cross-sell items to the products in the Disco Ball section of HouseOfRave.
Another improvement to the disco ball section today is the addition of a “how-to” page. Every once in a while I get calls or emails asking what is needed to create a full disco ball setup. I’m sure if a few people are emailing and asking about this, a lot more are wondering.
Come to think about it…it isn’t very intuitive. People who want a whole disco ball setup in their house, apartment, game room, business…whatever, need three things: A disco ball, a motor and a light. There are different types of disco balls, different motors for different sized disco balls and different types of lights. To cure this confusion I decided to make a simple graphic that explains this:
….that’s not quite enough to explain it, so when clicked, it brings visitors to the “How To Setup A Disco Ball” page which I made today. I’ll admit this isn’t the neatest tutorial around, but it can help clear up some confusion to the novice disco ball buyer.
In the tutorial are several steps on how to setup a disco ball and it also shows HouseOfRave’s offerings. It isn’t overly complicated, but it gives people a better idea of what’s needed.
I wrote the tutorial, snapped some quick pictures, cropped them and posted them in a new page. Hopefully this little addition will help improve the quality of the Disco Ball section.
On Noah’s recent trip to Austin I introduced him to a friend who’s a huge player in the viral marketing field. Now he runs a big media company yadda yadda, and showed us some of his tactics.
One of the things he’s absolutely fanatical about is optimizing his checkout forms. Whether for buying a product, filling out an email form….basically anything with a customer text entry box…he does massive amounts of multi-variate testing to see which layout, which font, which words, which images, which checkout flow, which spacing etc. results in the highest amount of successful transactions.
Now his market and sales are much different than mine on HouseOfRave, but something can be learned from this.
SO I decided to take a page from his book and for the first time EVER….optimize the checkout form on HoR.
I was actually quite horrified at how bad it was. The colors made me wanna throw up, there were no links to see the products you were buying, there were some confusing forms, some unnecessary fields and more simple fixes that had remained untouched for years.
Thanks to the recent upgrade of Shopsite I have the ability to change my forms a lot more. I realized that a lot of these names are strange to people and they have no idea what they’re getting when they press “Checkout.” Fortunately I can now add links and images on the shopping cart, which lets people know what they’re getting. Now when someone adds something to the shopping cart it looks something like this:
When people checkout they now see something like this:
There’s a lot of very minor changes in this new form such as the addition of writing “Optional” on the ‘Address 2’ field. Despite most people knowing this is where you’d enter an apartment number or office number, some people not familiar with online commerce scratch their heads wondering why they need to enter a 2nd address. Clearly writing “Optional” instead of simply denoting it with an *asterisks* should help.
I also want people to give suggestions in the comment box, so I wrote that. I want to change it soon to include something like “Why are you buying these products?” so I can more clearly understand what market I’m catering to (Hint: hardly anyone actually buys from the site for raves…it’s kind of counter-intuitive).
There were also little things like lining up the text entry boxes correctly so it looks neat.
If you can spot any confusing parts of the form or have suggestions, please let me know. I also plan on doing this sometime soon:
Allowing all the readers of this blog to place test orders on the site and send me feedback on what they thought was confusing or could be improved. I’ll try to get that test out sometime this month.
There’s still a lot of work to do, but simply paying some attention to the things I’ve overlooked for so long has already made a world of difference.
I don’t know where this came from, but I was randomly curious on how much it costs me to simply exist here in Austin, TX. per year.
Fixed Yearly Costs:
$1,000 = Car insurance ($84/month)
$1,800 = Health insurance ($150/month)
$960 = Cell phone ($80/month)
$6,000 = Rent ($500/month)
$12,000 = Food, gas, general items ($1,000/month)
$2,400 = Random Costs ($200/month)
Total = $24,160
That’s just to live, doesn’t even account for going out, travelling etc.
I also have few monthly bills because I have no debt, no loans and no car payment.
Hmmm….good to know.
Today for updating HoR I added a few more products to the site to various sections, nothing particularly crazy but a necessary step in the improvement process.
I also took advantage of a feature in the recent upgrade of Shopsite: Google Sitemaps. The new software automatically populates a sitemap specially designed for Google and submits it via the Google Webmaster Tools.
On another note, a very small change that has been particularly helpful lately has been the percentages metric I added to my accounting sheet. Little did I realize how many of my products had a much older version of the shipping metric on them.
It becomes especially apparent on large orders where my percentage should be 30+ percent. Before I would get a large order, and after the numbers were entered, a nice profit sum would be spit out. This profit seems nice until you realize it should be nearly a third higher. What a big difference such a small metric can make!
I did the $325 upgrade for my shopping cart software, and I am proud to announce something:
It was the first installation of new server software in the history of mankind where nothing went wrong.
On another not I got the 4th of July section relatively done, populated and have put up a small denotation for it in the left navigation bar:
I’ve also got the Froogle feed setup…another thanks to Adam’s post about this. It went pretty smoothly thanks to an automatic Google Base submit feature in the newest version of Shopsite I just upgraded to.