Landing Page Experiment: A Full Site Test!

My first test is still running fine and I'll get back to that one when more data has come in. Unlike that first test, which was simply swapping out some variations of different sales page elements, my second test was much more involved!

I just finished launching the second test, and quite frankly I'm a little nervous given all the changes that were involved. Here's the scenario:

This test became so involved I'm going to post the links to the new and old so you can get a feel for yourselves.

I wanted to change a the landing page of an old site of mine. The site sells a book that teaches professional valuation techniques, applied to websites. It was one of my first projects and is a small technical niche - kind of a "near the heart" thing and not so much for the sales.

The plan was to incorporate the sales page into the landing page, and eliminate some of the paths that needed to be taken before a visitor is presented with the option to buy the book. The problem is those paths were many, and in order to keep a good amount of information (like table of contents samples), many pages had to be duplicated and re-designed since the sales page was now the index (those other pages had links to the old sales page location). Can you picture this mess?

So I did it. I created the new landing pages, cut out a bunch of the duplicate links and paths, and just left the table of cocntents samples. For each sampl, I built a new page that sent the visitor back to the index, so they dont end up at what was the old sales page.

This basically creates a whole new site - the content being the same, but the whole navigation system is different...Im sure I screwed something up I'll catch tomorrow.

Problems and tips: these were o' plenty - but it's a bit late now so Im going to post details tomorrow. For now, I've setup the 'old' and the 'new' in a separate directory and kept all the linking for each as if Google Website Optimizer brought you to each page.

The old, original index was this: Original



The new index, and site navigatio and sample pages is here: New Variant




note: In order to put this "original" out there, I had to remove all Google Optimizer coding.

Like I said, I'll dive into the details of actually creating this test tomorrow...