I’m nearly ready to put the new, shiny, responsive PerfectTablePlan website live.
Here is the current PerfectTablePlan website:
http://www.perfecttableplan.com/
Here is my new website (all ~160 pages of it):
http://www.oryxdigital.com/ptptest/
The ‘buy’ page doesn’t work yet. Everything else should be ok.
What do you think? Any issues on your browser/OS/phone?
It works perfectly with Firefox in Linux.
Also, great design and really clean HTML! Do you build the template by yourself, or you bought it? If so, where did you bought it?
Nice work! Everything fine on Win10 / FF42. I like it.
It seems you did all the CSS from scratch, no framework? How was the experience?
Works perfectly for me on Chrome+OS X, at all sorts of odd screen resolutions. It is also lightning fast. The web as it should be.
I ran a design competition on 99designs.com, which produced some photoshop page designs. I then paid pixelgrayon.com to code them into CSS/HTML. Then I poured all the old site content into the new design, clearing out as much old cruft as I could at the same time. The whole process has taken months of elapsed time and weeks of my effort. I hope its worth it!
It is just static HTML/CSS. No frameworks. So hopefully it should pretty fast.
Fairly painful. Mostly down to:
-the size of the site (~160 pages ported, a lot more if you count newsletters and help)
-the dismal state of the current site, which is a ‘big ball of mud’ implemented with a horrible WSIWYG HTML editor
-my lack of knowledge of CSS and responsive design
Having different people do the design and coding also causes issue. But it has advantages as well.
It took way longer than expected, as these things always do.
Nice design, for some reason I think it looks better on the phone than on the pc, perhaps it looks more compact on phone, perhaps a little too spread out on the pc.
Are planning on A/B testing the designs?
Oooooooooooooooh, yes!
Clarification:
I plan to A/B test variants on the new design. I won’t be A/B testing the old design vs the new design because:
What an update and improvement! I like it but had one thing that was bothering me… the crammed text beneath the logo. Thought it was worth showing a small adjustment that came to mind…
Is the structure the same as the old website, ie all the urls the same? If not how do you plan on managing the change from an SEO perspective and not having dead links?
Yes. I have tried to keep all the urls and file paths the same, as far as I can. A couple of pages I didn’t bother to port will have permanent redirects. I don’t want to loose all that lovely organic traffic!
I think the text gets lost there.
I want to try to keep it fairly similar to the orginal to start with, but I probably will A/B test different words and placements.
Looks beautiful on my phone! Much better! Can’t wait to hear the results of the a/b test!!
I can appreciate that. Size/color could help, but http://www.oryxdigital.com/ptptest/ delivers!
Looks good on my HTC One, except it is kinda hard to click on menu buttons. On that phone size the menus are usually get collected under the menu button and drop-down on click in large font.
…
As a new visitor I was puzzled by the screenshots on the home page – they change way too fast, I do not have time to actually absorb what they show.
Those images look OK on desktop, but on phone they are a) too small to really see anything and b) they are not under my control, so they are annoying. I believe the common solution now is a slider controller where I can choose the shown image either with clicks on smallish dots under the slider, or even with swipe movements.
Also, some of those screenshots apparently show the value, but what value is not clear to me: for instance, a screenshot with Mr and Ms Adams names has a curious upside-down text; I guess those are invitations? I believe a short wording in large font over that screenshot a-la “Print Well-Designed Invitations” would help to understand that benefit.
P.S. The price seems too small foo all tiers.
I can make them change slower. But if they are too slow you might have scrolled down before you realize they ae changing.
The animated gif is just to show that the software is versatile. You need to look at the ‘tour’ and ‘gallery’ to see what it can actually do in any detail.
I need to test a few different approaches, but I had to start somwhere.
Place cards (which are folded, hence the upside down text).
It is hard to know if your pricing is optimal. But I did experiment with raising the bottom tier price 20%, and sales went down >20%. Also remember that:
-a lot of people are only using my software for a single event
-most of my competition is free (wedding websites)
-the software isn’t something you can show off (unlike an expensive cake or wedding dress)
-I am a bit nervous about breaking something that works!
New design is much more modern and I really like it, but there’s one big difference in content which would make me reluctant to put it in production.
What I immediately noticed is that old design have prominent “Find out how PerfectTablePlan can help you plan your: Wedding reception, Masonic dinner, …” links. I didn’t even noticed these links on new site until I started looking. For me, these links were the first thing I noticed on old site and they really grabbed my attention, because they’re so specific to problem you have at hand. On new site I would be more inclined to visit other generic sections of the site, and if it didn’t catch my attention in few clicks I would probably wonder of somewhere else.
Now, this is just one data point. What are your stats showing, how many users click on these specific links when they come to the home page?
I am also a bit concerned that these links don’t look look that much like links. I’m not sure what I can do to make them look more like links. Add underlines?
I don’t have a problem with recognizing them as links. I have a problem that they’re all the way at the bottom. I feel that they should be more prominently displayed, even replacing that animated gif on the top which doesn’t say that much to new coming visitor.
I could be wrong though, that’s why I asked if you took a look on existing data on how first time users are traversing your site. Do they prefer hand holding for their specific problem or not?
