Cre8tive Flow

“If I only have time to fix two pages on my site, which two should they be?”

Almost every website owner I know would like the answer to this question. How do you prioritize website changes to best use your available time, money, and skill?

If you have been following this series, you already have some good ideas for changes to your site. In fact, your list may be way too long, and we only looked at a couple of web analytics reports! Data has a tendency to do that – you sometimes get more answers than you can handle.

How do you pick what comes first? Here are my guiding principles:

1) Keep it manageable. Pick one or two changes, get them done, track how well they do. Then pick another change or two. If it doesn’t feel manageable, slow down.

2) Start with the simple changes. I often see the most dramatic improvements on client websites from the simplest changes – reordering the navigation menu, making page titles clearer, simplifying forms.

3) Change what you can measure. People waste a lot of time and money making changes that they don’t or can’t measure.

This incremental approach – change your website a bit at a time forever – doesn’t sit well with everyone. Some people are pretty goal focused and just want the darn thing done. Some people are really, really tired of constantly changing their site. And some people like the shivers they get from completely redoing their website annually.

However, without reviewing web data all those people run the risk of a lot of waste – either wasted effort, or wasted opportunity.

If you’re a website owner that would like to avoid the extremes, and get rewarded for a little bit of well focused effort, then I hope you’re starting to think of your web visitor data as a really useful tool.Your last bit of homework is to spend 15 minutes looking at a report in your web analytics tool that we haven’t talked about yet – with your “things I want to know about my website” questions in hand. What you do after that is up to you!