An oft discussed but infrequently implemented feature of good web design is what we call conversion tracking. This is where you randomly offer users one of two or more versions of the same page, and then compare their relative merits at getting the users to do whatever your page is there to help them do.

A couple of weeks ago we finally started to test our first working version of conversion tracking on the homepage of HearFromYourMP. We provided two versions – the super elegent, minimalist version that had a simple, bold heading and almost nothing else, and a more verbose, text heavy version explaining what the site did.

As congenital advocate of super-simple sites, I was really hoping the public would go for the less wordy version. Did they? No, of course not – the conversion rate from visitor to subscriber was 16.5% for the simple version, and 23% for the more text filled version. Slightly gallingly, this means we might have forfeited thousands of signers since our launch in November.

So, as painful as it was, we’ve now abandoned the minimalist version, and we’re comparing two more text heavy versions. You can see the process in action if you go to HearFromYourMP and hit refresh a few times.

Over time we’ll role this out to all of our sites and a never ending ‘winner stays on’ competition will start between different versions of important pages. Maybe we could even start taking bets? 🙂

You’ve hopefully seen our WriteToThem.com 2005 Zeitgeist by now. Yesterday, Chris wrote up a useful description of confidence intervals, which I’d encourage you to read if you haven’t already. Just taking the mean of questionnaire responses like this is no good; it’s important to also look at how certain you are about the result.

While he was doing all that serious binomial bayes stuff, I had fun making pretty pictures. I used basically the same code as in the gnuplot tutorial which Chris gave me at the end of last year. Gnuplot remains lovely, however it produced pictures as ugly as this. If only there was built in anti-aliasing.

Chris tried to persuade me to tart them up using xfig, an old Unix diagram editor, but its interface was too much for me. Instead I exported as SVG and loaded them into Inkscape. It’s a lovely open source vector drawing package, available for Windows as well as the Linux that I use. I edited the colours and thickness of the graph line, and touched up the labels. However, I couldn’t work out how to easily reflect the tic marks on the axes so they face outwards. Here the text file format of SVG came to the rescue; I could edit the coordinates directly using vim.

After all this, the PNG file came out with a transparent background. Matthew spotted that this appears as grey on Internet Explorer, so I used Gimp to flatten it to a white layer behind.

I’m not working for MySociety today, but Chris just got hassle-d and he isn’t around. Anyway, late last night, I rejigged the pledge page to make it look prettier – removing pink, getting links to have correct background colours, moving actions to the top, and so on. It still needs a bit of work (reading emails sent today, Etienne has made some good suggestions that I’ll implement shortly), but it’s looking good.

Someone has had trouble printing off some PledgeBank flyers. Not sure what that problem could be, they appear fine here; but I don’t have a printer to test with.

And Not Apathetic is still climbing the Google charts for apathetic, though whether it appears as 2 or 3 seems to depend on who you are…

Pub quiz night tonight, yay.

I also saw hassle’s message to Tom, and wrote this at the same time as Chris wrote his; no duplication of work goes on here, no sir. 🙂

So, I’m off ill (hopefully only for the day), but I seem to be all right enough to sit in bed doing some design work for NotApathetic (fieldset is a much underused element of HTML), talking about colours for same (I don’t think it really matters what colour it is, others don’t want it to be associated with any political party, but they (the parties) seem to have all colours wrapped up and greys are hard to do not dull – ooh, another Matthew has found a nice non-party bluey-green, looks good to me), and discuss various wording (including fixing Tom’s pledge when he did it wrong – we do need more warnings that it’s unchangeable once created – unless you know someone with database access 😉 ).

I also worked on Good Friday (don’t get me started on how complicated it is to account for bank holidays at work, being part-time; and I had nothing better to do), adding iCal entries for PledgeBank, storing a hash of the password for private pledges, and other things like that.

Probably not doing much else today, but will be working on NA or PB on Friday, hopefully getting them on the way to being done. 🙂

After many months of languishing un-updated, on the most 1996 of software platforms, mySociety.org has been given a healthy boost by the tireless Francis Irving. He’s installed the open source blogging/CMS system WordPress, converted lots of the pre-existing data, and most important, given me a login. From now on mySociety.org should be a living breathing page again, full of tasty nuggets about mySociety and its Launch Projects.