Watch Your Visitors

Want to know why visitors are not completing that form on your website? Why do so many people leave your comments page without leaving a comment? The best way to answer these types of questions is to watch your visitors to discover how they use your site.

I’ve previously mentioned the excellent tracking tools from Woopra and Clicktale. Much like Clicktale, userfly is another great visit recorder. You can record 10 users per month for free and watch the visits back on video in real time; including mouse movements, clicks and keyboard entries. To set it up you copy and paste a small piece of code into the head of the page(s) you want to track. You can place it on as many pages you want to but if you are only using the free option you might want to limit it to some specific pages you want to learn more about.

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Jpeg Compression software

Speeding up your website’s load time and conserving bandwidth go hand in hand and a key to achieving both is keeping your image sizes down. RIOT is a nice freeware tool that helps you compress your images as much as possible while maintaining as much quality as you can. Side by side previews show before and after comparisons for Jpeg, Gif and PNG files. You can even compress to a specific size you request. Similar to Adobe ImageReady but free!
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CMS Roundup

Content Management Systems are more and more available, common and increasingly popular. The WordPress blogging platform is just one example. CMS can be used for all types of web sites from blogs to message boards to collaborative web sites or simply as a way to create a site for a client that they can edit themselves.

There are so many CMS options out there that choosing one can be daunting. Steven Snell at Designm.ag has a great roundup of dozens of the most popular including links to tutorials and tips on how to put them to use. Don’t forget to scan the comments for even more useful thoughts.

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Blog Survey Plugin

This plugin helps you easily create and monitor web surveys, polls and other types of webforms from within the Wordpress admin interface. A free SurveyGizmo account is required.
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Graffiti Fonts

A great thing about Graffiti Fonts is that anything you type with it automatically looks like you’ve spent a lot of time designing it, it’s typography with graphic design built in. Thanks to Web Design Blog you can download 75 free graffiti fonts to start off or compliment your collection.
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