Touch me, where?

POSTED IN my projects | TAGS : my projects, stats 22 August 2007

I signed up with a trial of  Crazy Egg (which does ‘heatmaps’ of your webpages to see where people clicked), just to see what it’s about and let it lose on the main page of BiNS for a day or two.  It seems a really powerful tool – though it might be useful to have more of an idea of what you wanted from the research than I did. With a full stats package you can work this sort of stuff out for yourself, at least how many hits one bit of your site gets – but it’s a nice graphical report and for people like me where hosting charges have led you to split your site across different free packages (blogger, chatarea and the stats-lite blueyonder hosting in this case) it’s quite handy.

Things I’m quite surprised at are:

• how much people will scroll past ‘the fold’ – I was a bit conficted when I first move the blogroll down the page to fit in my upyerBrum badge, it seemed a bit nasty to bump someone else’s work in favour of your own, but each blog got a few clicks (more than I would have expected)
• more clicks on plain ‘underlined’ links verses icons for the same thing than I would have expected. Poor icon design, or conversational linkage working well?
• not as much traffic is drawn the the blog updates at the right hand side of the page as I would have thought – I’m toying with a few ideas for greater blog integration and this might have pushed me towards one more than the others