Testing shows how much you love your users

One of the challenges of doing something new is the need to educate prospective partners/customers. Let’s be honest – anyone who blazes a trail has their work cut out. We have conversations with site owners about what we do, and as the idea of ‘content layout optimization’ is fairly new to them, we are starting from scratch in many cases. Not just ‘who is Ezoic and what do we do’, but the whole concept of ‘content layout optimization’ has to be tackled as well.

One challenge that comes immediately to mind, is helping our customers to embrace the concept of ‘objective testing over subjective beauty’. If you’ve been doing this ‘by eye’ for years and years, it’s hard to stand back and let a computer do it for you. After all, even the most skilled and experienced human cannot test hundreds and thousands of variables to see what their users like best. It’s akin to an ATM replacing a teller at a bank; some people liked the personal interaction, but at the end of the day, the world moved on and now it’s part of every day life. We think layout optimization will go the same way.

And our enlightened publishers all agree; “Yes, I want to make more money from the content I’ve produced and yes, I would also like to improve my site’s usability and get improved time on site, page views per user, and yes – a free mobile and tablet enabled version of my site would be awesome”. Sure. Who wouldn’t want all that? And the Ezoic system will have produced smart, snappy new versions of the site on desktop, mobile and tablet and test to see what the users like best. For some site owners though, there can be a period of, well how do I put this  – mourning – for their old site.  And that is a shame. To be blunt, I think they have it backwards. Attachment to the ‘old look’ is to deny the potential of what they have created. It’s not the look of the site that will be a site owner’s online legacy; it’s the original content they created. In the information age, this is what people want – access to the content.

Whether the content is about beekeeping, green bean growing, roman history or crochet patterns, it’s the content itself that matters.  Pride in having built a wonderful resource that people can use in the future, on every conceivable device – that’s where the satisfaction should be for the publisher; not in how it used to look in 2013.

So come on lovely publishers – be proud of your amazing content, not its looks.