The new site is now live:
http://www.perfecttableplan.com/
Thanks for all the feedback. Some of it has been incorporated and the rest of it is on a ‘to do’ list.
I ported about 160 pages to the new design and also reorganized the help and newsletters and did a lot of other tidying up. While trying to preserve existing urls so as not to loose organic search. I was a big job. So I hope this website will also last 10 years!
Congrats for your new website! It’s something I need to do for my sites also but a big and time consuming project.
It looks uncluttered and well designed. It’s looking good on my iPhone and iPad. One problem I noticed on my iPhone on the Order page from Avangate: the hotline number is overlapped with the sub-header.
Any particular reason for not using Bootstrap?
It certainly was!
That is just a temporary template. Avangate are doing a responsive one for me.
I wanted to minimize the number of dependencies. I am hoping this website design will also last 10 years! Also I find that frameworks can be quite restrictive.
Hi Andy,
The site looks good!
I realize that in your case, a ‘radical redesign’ was probably the right choice; this article talks about how to minimize the dangers of a radical re-design:
If you like to talk about numbers, I’d be curious to know how many monthly sales you average – I’m curious if you have enough transactions to make A/B testing useful.
I was careful to try and keep the same urls, titles, meta descriptions etc for higher traffic pages.
Yes, I have enough traffic for A/B tests. They take a while though. I am planning to run some tests on the new site.
Excellent. Since you’ve now got your new design up, I’m not sure how much the website copy you changed – which is what I was primarily curious about.
The article suggests running “conversion research” which I’ve found really valuable.
How do you usually come up with your A/B test ideas?
Text is very similar, but updated in places. Some images have been updated.
Interesting article you linked. My website satisfied 3 out of 4 crieria for a radical redesign:
-You’ve hit the local maxima (ran out of ideas for more A/B tests)
-Outdated technology
-The design of the site is amateur
I am staggered to read that M&S spent £150m on their website redesign (which resulted in an 8% drop in conversion rate).
a) reading about what has worked on other websites.
b) knowing my market.
c) guesswork.
Hey Andy -
I just saw you mention your site in another thread and then remember seeing this thread - love the idea of PTP! I had a wedding a couple years ago and would have loved this. Too bad I’m just finding out about it now, but will pass it on to some of my newlywed friends.
What are you doing to get exposure for PTP?? I always find the hardest part is marketing, so just curious what you’ve found to work so far 
You name it - I’ve probably tried it at some point in the last 11 years. See http://www.successfulsoftware.net for details. Its reasonably well known in its niche now and most of the traffic come organic search, PPC and word of mouth.
I like it. The only critique I would have is that the fonts and icon sort of make it look like a developer tool. Perhaps get rid of the laptop and just make the UI come forward. Maybe use more celebratory fonts
Event planners seem to love their laptops. But I plan to A/B test other images at some point.
I like open sans. I’m not sure what would be more ‘celebratory’ as well as work across lots of different browsers and OSs.
Wow, great job… looks great… I guess it’s been online for a little while now, have you seen any difference in conversion rates with the old design?
Just did a project for a non profit selling memberships that went very well… and did a responsive website for it… and glad I did, when I look at the stats more than half the sales came from mobile devices (phones and tablets…)…
Congrats… really nice upgrade…
Thanks. This is is quiet time of year for me. I am going to give it a few more weeks before I start to crunch the numbers. But it looks like mobile traffic has gone up.
I just happened to see Perfect Table Plan on the Amazon site. Wonderful!
Andy: My vague memory from long ago is that selling downloadable software at Amazon is painful. Did you have to go the route of putting it in a CD-ROM, getting a UPC etc. in order to sell it there?
I used a third party (‘Great Mind Software’). I just upload a new .iso every now and then. They do all the legwork and take a commission.
How did you feel after it was done though
I felt very tired!..