3 Reasons Why it is Important to Test Drive Your Site

September 20th, 2007

How well do you know your own site?

If you’re answer is anything other than “like the palm of my hand”, you should immediately go and learn every aspect of your website – after you finish reading this article, of course ;)

Webmasters set up a new site, install a nice template and make some modifications to it for a more unique feel, and then start writing content. But not all of them give their site a full “test drive”, and end up missing something important – I know this because it happened to me on this very site.

Why is it important to test drive your site?

You need to make sure that structurally your layout displays correctly for all users with all browsers on all pages of your site. Obviously, you can only do so much of this yourself. This is where it is handy to ask fellow webmasters or friends to give your site a whirl and see what they think – and who knows, maybe they will like it enough to subscribe.
You need to see from the perspective of the user – sure, your design may make sense to you, but is it confusing to the user? The average reader won’t spend more than a couple of seconds looking for what they want, and if they fail to find it, they’re gone. Make sure your linking strategies are obvious and all of your site’s important options (like subscribing to your RSS feed) are clearly displayed to the user on all pages.
Notice what is not on your site. Are you missing a search function? Maybe your header logo does not link back to your index? Is there no way for a reader to get in contact with you?

This is where I made a mistake. On my homepage, there is a large eye-catching button for my RSS feed on the side menu bar. However, I never noticed that when viewing a single article, the button no longer displays. In fact, there was no way a user would even know that I even had a RSS feed, let alone be able to subscribe to it.

Here is the real disaster – all of the social bookmarking sites that index my articles and point interested users to them link directly to the single article, not the home page. So when any of my stories, for example, get traffic from Digg, the users are being taken directly to the article where I am not giving them an option to subscribe. Most of them are reading and leaving, whereas if I had that RSS button displayed they would have been far more likely to become repeat visitors.

Think of this: it’s real easy to click one button and subscribe to a site’s RSS feed and “preview” the content for a couple of days to see if you want to become a regular reader. But if you have to instead bookmark the site (most people already have more bookmarks than they’ll ever visit) and remember to visit it again in a day or two…well, let’s just say that the odds are not in your favor.

So, the moral of this story is to learn your site insides and out – you may be surprised with what you find. Think of all of the potential subscribers I could have missed out on if I had not caught this over site so early.

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