This guest post is by Stephen Guise of Deep Existence.
Forming an emotional attachment to any component of your website is dangerous and unwise. Did you know that the smallest changes can have a massive impact on your results? Human psychology is very sensitive to minute details—this means that your visitors are picky!
If you don’t believe small details can make a difference, you probably haven’t heard about split testing. Briefly, split testing allows you to split your traffic towards two landing pages with only slight differences, and then analyze the results. Taking a look at some of the published results of split testing should be all the motivation you need to start experimenting.
Trying new things
Since fine-tuning our blogs can make such a difference, we have to experiment to see what works. What if we were so happy with cars and boats that we didn't consider flying? Thanks to the Wright brothers, we now have the airplane.
But why would we stop at flying? Next up might be teleportation—and you’ll likely laugh at the idea of teleportation, but is it much more absurd than a 1.41 million-pound machine flying around? I hope we can reassemble the molecules of people after they teleport. Maybe we should try sending a bagel through first?
Header tweaking
I do practice what I preach. I've made more modifications to my website in two months than some people make in years. It has paid off as I have finally found a design that I'm very happy with. Improvements can still be made. Here is my header image evolution. I have spent dozens of hours on this one aspect.
Note: Some of the following header images are moderately to terribly embarrassing, but I’ll do anything to prove a point.
My first header ... was awful
I upgraded the acorn so it wasn't a pixelated mess
I scrapped the...
