July 24, 2007

Heat maps for better web design, marketing benchmarks, and a dead software CEO

by Gordon Graham, Editor, SoftwareCEO

This issue we have a grab bag with all the following resources for software execs:

• Some surprising tips on creating better home pages,
• A free tool to generate "heat maps" of your own web pages,
• A detailed new report on technology marketing,
• A mystery novel about a software CEO found dead in his office,
• A video tour of the Googleplex, and
• An update on four software firms we profiled that continue to shine.

Tips on B2B home page design.
A recent study from our friends at MarketingSherpa used heat maps to analyze how executives look at technology websites.

The "B-to-B Web Site Homepage Design Research Study" looked in particular at the home pages for three large technology vendors: Sun, IBM, and Oracle.

And its research-based findings may surprise you. They are quite literally eye-opening.

Home page design tip #1: Just because everyone else does it, you don't have to.
MarketingSherpa's team considered the typical big tech company's home page, and then suggested a couple alternate versions. No one quite knew what would happen.

In the end, both the alternatives consistently rated better than the originals.

The moral?

"Don't assume that a website layout style is best because you see many big companies using it," says the report. "If our art department, with a few quick changes, can exceed the apparent results for Oracle, Sun, and IBM, so can yours."

Home page design tip #2: Use fewer columns.
One thing the alternate versions did was show fewer columns, preferably one for the content and one for a menu.

Any more columns consistently created lag and confusion for business testers.

"Fewer columns tend to improve comprehension. The average B2B homepage has four or more columns. That's probably too many," concludes the report.

But if you go down to one column, keep it narrow enough to be readable. Any more than 65 characters across, and a line of text starts to get awfully hard to read.

Home page design tip #3: Get the billboard out of the traffic.
This is the one that's most difficult for web designers to swallow, but the research consistently pointed it out.

You know that great big photo on your home page? It's probably a waste of space, and just as irritating as a billboard dropped onto an expressway.

"Most of your graphic images are wasted. Home page real estate is precious; don't throw away attention on graphics, especially people pictures, that don't relate directly to the business at hand."

A home page is not the same as a magazine ad, so why should it be designed the same?

"As these tests showed, you can get great results for billboard viewing if you're slightly more polite about its placement. Your billboard can still be above the fold... just put it slightly to the bottom, or over on the side of the page," says the report.

That way, your busy visitors can take in your billboard if they want to, or else get on with clicking through to the content they're really after.

The one type of photo that everyone tends to look at longest was a woman's face, especially if it had a strong link to the content on the page.

And remember, business people prefer to click on text links that state clearly what they lead to, not arcane icons or vague graphics.

Home page design tip #4: Break up key paragraphs into bullets.
"Bullet points are about the only graphics... that inevitably raise response, readership, comprehension, and satisfaction," concludes the report.

That means you should definitely consider breaking up your Elevator Pitch into bullets. More visitors will take it in.

• This finding confirms what we've long suspected:
• Most people don't "read" web pages.
• Instead, they tend to skim, scan, and skip through the web.
• Sometimes visitors take in as little as 25 percent of the text on any web page.
• Reality check: What do you do when you encounter a long chunk of text on a web page?

So bullets rule; use them more often. But remember that once a list reaches seven to nine items, bullets start to lose their impact. And a page full of nothing but bulleted lists is as bad as any other undifferentiated blather of text.

Use bullets as your most common spice, like salt, not as the main ingredient in the dish.

Home page design tip #5: Sharpen up your "About Us" page.
More visitors read "About Us" than you ever suspected.

Sadly, many "About Us" pages are flabby exercises in navel-gazing rather than a way to effectively engage prospects.

"Unfortunately, for many companies the 'About Us' pages are copywritten and designed as much by internal politics as they are by marketing best practices," says the report.

"If the 'About Us' pages we've seen over seven years of reviewing B2B websites are any example, your pages are dry, boring, and have no interactive or lead-generation possibilities at all.

"Why not form a task force and consider updating yours with an eye toward conversion? The great thing is it won't cost much and the results should be easily measurable."

A free heat mapping tool.
Of course, doing heat mapping research on your own site is not something most software execs can justify paying for, or even afford to pay for.

So we found a free tool that generates a reasonably useful heat map image at www.feng-gui.com. It apparently uses AI to simulate the movement of visitor's eyes on a web page.

Part of the site was down for maintenance when we last visited it, but you can still take a screenshot of your web page and browse to it to generate a heat map.

Here's an example of what the site produced from SoftwareCEO's home page while the previous issue was still up.

Graphics like this one — on top of the findings listed above — can help execs direct a web team away from "pretty pictures" and towards sites that really get results.

If you want to dig deeper into this stuff, there's lots more tools, samples, and a blog on this site.

MarketingSherpa's Business Technology Marketing Benchmark Guide 2007-2008 is the best one yet.
We've always liked these guides from MarketingSherpa, and the fourth annual edition is the best one yet.

And it's bundled with the website report mentioned above.

The content of the benchmark report’s based on recent surveys of 4,600+ executives who buy business technology and 1,000+ marketing executives who try to sell it to them.

That means this 287-page edition is nearly all new, with many charts offering up the deltas between the findings from the last edition and this one.

Software marketers will be interested in the hard-to-find benchmarks on budgets, e-mail open and click rates, SEM and SEO costs and results, and response rates to traditional, offline campaigns. All of these can help you compare your results to a broad selection of your peers.

This report also includes specific, research-based recommendations for how to boost your results from various campaigns, everything from e-mail to podcasts.

This report is so helpful that it's not an exaggeration to say it should be on the shelf of every marketing director of every ISV.

To buy both reports for $297, click here.

Software CEO's novel tells it like it was during dot-com bubble.
My eyes are bloodshot and I'm waaaay behind on my deadlines, ever since I came across an intriguing novel called Hackoff.com set during the dot-com meltdown.

The text includes e-mails, press releases, online chats, and even transcripts of interviews with the police detective assigned to find out what happened to software CEO Larry Lazard, who was found dead in his office one morning with a gunshot to the head.

What's more, you can read the book for free online, listen to it as a series of podcasts, or even buy a printed copy for $18.96 from Amazon.

If you're at all interested in what really happened during the dot-com bubble, this book gives a true insider's perspective from a software CEO who was there, Tom Evslin.

Hackoff.com may not be a literary masterpiece, but it's packed with tons of hyper-realistic details on what it was like to do an IPO at the turn of the century... and much of it is still useful to anyone contemplating going public today.

Best of all, reading this book at the beach almost counts as doing business research!

Inside Google (again)
If you just can't get enough of the Googleplex, here's a five-minute video tour of the company's site in Mountain View, Calif.

This brief slice-of-life walk-around features commentary by San Jose Mercury News columnist Dean Takahashi, along with close-ups of the famous free food.

Google's mainly organic, low-fat food is so plentiful that Takahashi's guide told him she only goes to the grocery store once a month.

Update: Software firms that we profiled shine on.
SoftwareCEO is constantly on the lookout for the "best and the brightest" of our industry to profile.

Our picks were confirmed when we checked back on all the software companies we've featured in the past year: No less than four firms have passed huge milestones since we covered them. Here's a brief update.

SPI Dynamics, which we covered in June 2007, will be acquired by HP in a transaction expected to close in Q3 of 2007. The terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

The Atlanta-based company's software is used to secure web applications, an increasingly critical task for many enterprises.

One highlight of our story was how CEO Brian Cohen attracted VC financing: "I was the grey hair who had done it before," he says, so investors felt confident about giving him a check.

Looks like he's done it again with this acquisition.

eProject, covered in May 2007, completed a series B round of financing for a total of $12 million. The round was led by Bay Partners and included previous investor Kennet Partners.

Our story had included a positive perspective on VC from Jeff Pancottine, CEO of the Seattle-based software firm.

"Venture funding isn't bad. In fact, it is very, very good, as long as you are continuing to grow as a company," he says.

"Typically the founders don't like VC because they don't want to give away their equity. But the flip side is that if you use that capital wisely, you can grow the company much faster and further."

With new funding in hand, eProject plans to expand from 110 to 150 employees. On top of this, the company was recently positioned as a "Visionary" in its market niche by Gartner.

Antenna Software, covered in April this year, has signed a strategic partnership with wireless giant AT&T to sell Antenna's mobile CRM solutions on a variety of mobile devices.

"The comprehensive go-to-market plan defined by Antenna and AT&T is based on the foundation of success we have developed over the past five years, including several joint customer wins and award-winning enterprise deployments," said Antenna CEO Jim Hemmer.

That partnership should bring in a load of new enterprise customers for the Jersey City, NJ-based software firm.

Ketera, covered here last December, early in 2007 secured $14 million in a mezzanine round of funding led by DAG Ventures and joined by Teachers' Private Capital, one of the world's largest pension plans. The round included follow-on investments from all existing investors.

Of course, the firms we profiled that haven't lined up any new funding have all been busy doing what they do best: making great software, picking up awards, and signing new clients.