Who’s responsible for your site’s error messages? Who decides what they say, when they appear, and how they look? It’s a key question—because if you haven’t paid attention to how your site treats visitors when things go wrong, their experience is much more likely to be negative—and talked about.

This article is second in a series I began in July. In that first article, I examined some ways to not only improve the effectiveness of error messages, but even go a step further and optimize them for conversion. Here, I’ll take a look at why so many sites have terrible error experiences, and who should be in charge of fixing it.

(Read the full article here, on Search Engine Land > )

On the web, errors are seemingly inevitable, and there are plenty of best practices for minimizing their negative effects. But what if we treated errors as an opportunity? What if we deliberately designed our customers’ error experience—not just for basic usability and clarity, but with conversion in mind?

In this article I’ll take a look at the concept of error experience design, why it’s important from a business perspective, and a few ways to turn an error into a conversion opportunity.

Why focus on errors?

I have to admit that part of my motivation here is purely selfish, as usual. I, personally, want a better, more enjoyable web experience. And errors, as the myriad stinging gnats of the web environment, should be made better so I can be happier. Simple as that.

I’m tired of seeing ugly, unfriendly errors like this one: …

[CONTINUE READING the complete article on Search Engine Land, HERE > ]

[Excerpt from the podcast notes:]
As the VP User Experience and Creative Director at Closed Loop Marketing, Sandra Niehaus is a passionate advocate for usability and design and she brings it all together to create, test and measure conversion-focused experiences for a long list of interesting companies. Sandra is also the co-author of Web Design for ROI with Lance Loveday, and you all know he’s a cool conversion dude as well.

I think you’ll find Sandra as fascinating as I did. She just knows how to create effective experiences. Listen in as she shares her thoughts on how to sell conversion optimization, why you need to know the numbers and what makes for a successful test.

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You’ll find the full recorded podcast here:  Conversations on Conversion podcast with Sandra Niehaus >

In the field of conversion optimization, there’s an understandable focus on landing pages. But why stop there? Every single touch point is an opportunity to improve the user experience and the bottom line. In this article I look at ways to optimize one of these oft-overlooked points: the thank you page.

READ THE FULL ARTICLE on SearchEngineLand >

(In the full article, you’ll find 10 examples of 4 different conversion optimization approaches for Thank You pages. Enjoy!)

View related topics: thank you page

As online marketers and conversion experts, we want our sites to be effective. No, it has to be said: we want more than that—we want to turn our sites into kick-butt conversion machines, leaving competitors in the dust with our screamin’ throughput and sales. But when does conversion optimization go too far? When does it stop being useful and become, well, evil?

Most of you know what I mean, because you’ve experienced the evil firsthand. Maybe you’ve even designed it. Experiences like these litter the internet, raising blood pressure around the globe:

[Read the full article on SearchEngineLand > ]