Using Heat MapTools to Enhance Site Usability
It has been quite some years the concept of Heatmap is there, but apart from few big websites most shy away from it. The primary focus always shift to getting more and more traffic & marketing but it’s equally important to focus on user interface & site navigation. The main reasons are to increase conversion rate, analyze page elements & work on design layout, optimize ad placements.
These are some really nice Heatmap tools which you can use on your websites
Crazy Egg – This tool is there for quite some time now. Initially there was free plan but now all plans are paid. Good interface, apart from Heat maps & scroll maps there is also a nice feature as confetti which lets you find click sources by site referrals, visitor sources.
Click Density- It has free as well as paid versions & also has advanced tracking system as well.
phpmyVisites – It is a free & powerful open source (GNU/GPL) software for websites statistics and audience measurements.
Seevolution – This service is relatively new having paid & free plans but has a nice feature as real-time website data & it can also be integrated with Google Analytics. It also has wordpress plugins, Magento & Drupal modules.
ClickTale – Though it has a free version but the paid versions are a bit costly. Apart from heatmaps they show a visual presentation of your visitors actions whic can be recorded including mouse movements, scrolls & clicks.
November 17, 2011 Leave a comment
Tool to Automate Event Tracking in Google Analytics
There are multiple ways to track outbound links, external links & downloads in Google Analytics discussed in many blogs & forums. Downloads can be tracked best by using _trackEvent function & assigning categories,functions & labels for the specific files to download. Similarly for outbound links you can use manual way as onClick=”recordOutboundLink & use parameters like category, action. But the manual process is very hectic & can’t be used for big sites.
There is a great tool called Analytics Engine by which you can easily track events like, external links, email clicks & file downloads for the overall website. The best part is they have a free version called Lite by which you can track around 100,000 Monthly Pageviews . It’s very easy to install just you need to put a small code snippet. Of course there is Pro & Enterprise versions which provide additional features like form interactions, scroll tracking, cross domain tagging etc. You can Download & try it out as it is really nice tool if you are interested in advanced Analytics.
November 8, 2011 Leave a comment
Create Visually Appealing Online Resume with Zerply
Currently Linkedin is THE social network geared for professionals now & doing great. But well does that stop us for searching surfing for new ones? atleast not me. Just by fun surfing came across Zerply & fell in love with the design & great user interface of the site. It lets you import your resume from Linkedin, some great themes & you can search similar professionals by searching tags and locations. Well it’s still a new site & will take some times to user number to grow, but must say it’s worth a look atleast if not anything. You can read a detailed review of the site here
October 24, 2011 Leave a comment
AnythingSlider jQuery Slider
I have been using lot of jQuery sliders nowadays for client’s projects as though come client’s insist on flash. Currently checked on the new AnythingSlider jQuery by Chris Coyier. I had worked with some other sliders in the past here & here by him, but this one have features of all the old ones along- with new feature as
Features
- Slides are HTML Content (can be anything)
- Next Slide / Previous Slide Arrows
- Navigation tabs are built and added dynamically (any number of slides)
- Optional custom function for formatting navigation text
- Auto-playing (optional feature, can start playing or stopped)
- Each slide has a hashtag (can link directly to specific slides)
- Infinite/Continuous sliding (always slides in the direction you are going, even at “last” slide)
- Multiple sliders allowable per-page (hashtags only work on first)
- Pauses autoPlay on hover (option)
- Link to specific slides from static text links
October 18, 2011 Leave a comment
Best 5 Lightweight PHP Editors
I always use Dreamweaver for editing/coding PHP codes & not being a programmer it works fine with me. Also have used Netbeans couple of times, but had issues with windows/Adobe & thought of experimenting with some lightweight free PHP editors for just the fun of it. 
Notepad++ - It is based on the powerful editing component Scintilla, & written in C++ and uses pure Win32 API and STL which ensures a higher execution speed and smaller program size. The best part is it uses low amount of resources that it uses& comes with great configuration possibilities. Operating System – Windows
Programmer’s Notepad- This is quiet a easy & fast editor with features as
- Syntax Highlighting for lots of languages, configured with schemes
- Multi-language user interface # Text Clips provide smart templates for text insertion
- Code Folding/Outlining the place in the file where they were generated
- Split Views
Operating System – Windows
DevPHP-Dev-PHP is a well-featured, fast IDE which is easy to use and has a lot of cool features : class browser, scripts preview, integration with PHP parsers, PHP-GTK library, and Xdebug. Operating System – Windows
Arisesoft Winsyntax- It is a very lightweight editor with features as # The search and replacing of the text in external files with different encoding.
- Code explorer for PHP-scripts – tree of the classes with variables and functions.
- Highlighting of syntax by different colors and styles of a font.
- Highlighting of syntax for several script languages in one document.
- Opportunities for customizing of highlighting and the addition of new languages.
- Multiple history of ‘Undo-Redo’ for the edited documents.
- Selection of the text by columns-lines-symbols.
- Conversion of tabulators to a series of spaces.
- Supporting of the line kinds for PC/UNIX and encoding between ANSI-UTF8-KOI8. # Gutter with numbering of lines of the text.
- Moving by mouse of the selected block of the text.
- Moving the cursor with ignoring of the line carry – for all width of line.
- Autoindent of the input line by start position of the previous line.
- Integrated File Manager for rapid access to the documents.
Operating System – Windows
Jedit-Written in Java, so it runs on Mac OS X, OS/2, Unix, VMS and Windows. – Plugins can be downloaded and installed from within jEdit using the “plugin manager” feature. – Auto indent, and syntax highlighting for more than 130 languages. - Folding for selectively hiding regions of text.
October 17, 2011 Leave a comment