March 2010 Blog Posts

yaTimer 2.5.2 Development Update

I’m finishing up version 2.5.2 of yaTimer, this is a bug fix version with no new features and will be a free upgrade for all customers. There were some problems with the 2.5.1 upgrade, to avoid those problem in the future I’m investing more time and effort in testing the 2.5.2 upgrade, I’m also updating the tools I use to create the update packages. Because of those intensive tests and some last minute improvements to the crush reporting mechanism getting version 2.5.2 out the door is taking longer than planned and it will be released as soon as...

What to do if yaTimer crushes after an upgrade

There was a bug in one of the yaTimer 2.5.1 upgrade packages, I think I’ve found the bug and I hope it wont happen again in the future. If you got the bad upgrade (or it does happen again) and  yaTimer crushes after the upgrade all you have to do is download and install the new version from the upgrade page, the setup program will automatically fix the problem. If this doesn’t help please enter your e-mail when sending the crush report, I read and try to solve every crush report I get, I may have a solution...

A/B Split Testing – your first test

This is the forth post in a series, you may want to read the previous posts first: part 1, part 2 and part 3. Now that we learned all about split testing you probably already want to test two designs of your web site to see if you can improve your sales (and if you don’t you should) but there’s one more small thing you should know before starting – what to test first. The first thing you need to test is your A/B testing software and your site, you do this by running your current design against...

The Most Important Reason to Release Early

A lot as been said about the benefits of releasing your product as early as possible – you get feedback earlier, if the product is doomed you find out earlier and you get some cash-flow earlier. But there is one even grater advantage, especially for tiny companies – it gets the product released. Back before I released yaTimer I had 4 mostly finished product I was going to sell, I wrote a web page for yaTimer with a form that let people request access to the beta, put it on-line and ran a small AdWords campaign. Before...

yaTimer 2.5.1 Released

I just uploaded yaTimer version 2.5.1 to the server, this is a bug fix only release with no new features, this is a free upgrade for all customers. If you have yaTimer 2.2 or later you can upgrade from within yaTimer by clicking the “check for updates” button in the about window or the options window - or you can wait for the automatic updates check (by default yaTimer checks for updates once a week). If you have an earlier version of yaTimer or you don’t want to use the automatic updater you can also upgrade from the...

A/B Split Testing – understanding the test results

This is the third post in the A/B testing series, you may want to read part 1 and part 2 first. So you started your test and after 10 visitors arrived to your site (5 in each group) 2 visitors from group B converted compared to just one from group A – the change improved conversion rate by 100% – time to party. Well, maybe it’s too early to party, just 10 visitors isn’t much and it’s possible those two customers arrived at the same group by accident, how do we know the next 3 visitors to group A won’t buy and...

A/B Split Testing – before you begin

Like anything in science there are some thing you need to know before running A/B tests, there are some basic things you have to get right or the whole test will be meaningless. As I said in the previous post A/B testing is done by dividing your visitors into two groups, we’ll call them A and B, and showing a different page to each group and than measure what group performed better, there are quite a few split testing tools out there and they should handle the technicalities I describe here automatically – but it’s important to know this in order...