The Blog

Release early, release often.

I first heard those words come from the founder of Digg, Kevin Rose (luckily our site is a bit more stable than Digg v4). This is something we have been doing since we touched our first table row back in the d-a-y.

When running a site, big or small, you constantly need to track user behavior and feedback in order to improve your site. We do not have all the answers but if you look deep enough you can find many of them.

We use two apps / tools to track our users and make the neccessary changes, Google Analytics for stat tracking and page navigation and Crazy Egg for click heatmaps. Using these two apps we have found out some amazing info, like words such as 'Gorgeous' can be clicked on more than an image and the power of a picture of a person is more than you think.

The Obox site has been going through contstant evolution and recently we pushed out a big update accross the site. I thought it would be cool to share with you some of the changes and the reasons behind them.

A new home page

Let's start with the home page, we have been very happy with how the previous home page worked. People clicked where wanted them to and surprisingly the majority of the visitors navigated the home page as it was intended.

The problem came in when we wanted to add new content to the home page, we felt that some character was missing and it needed a slight rejig but had trouble placing new elements and copy.

The old: Inform

The initial home page design was created to educate people about the 3 platforms we worked with and also featured a screenshot slider of our themes. Looking back it left us a bit cold though, because of its informative nature we couldn't go too wild with the copy.

The new: A bit more culture

Since launching the new site our modifications section has grown, coverage on big sites such as Mashable has also increased and our deals with Posterous and Tumblr have been significant.

We needed a place to say this but, with its right-hand-side dominated layout, we didn't have anywhere to put it. So we went for a 4 column grid which freed up more space for copy.

We have also stuck in a big quote from Posterous' CEO Sachin Agarwal and included a link to our team page (more on that soon).

The aim has been to lighten up our copy a bit and highlight some of the cool things Obox has done to emphasise that we are not "just another" Premium Theme company.

A More informative team page

When we ran From the Couch there was no doubt about who David and Marc Perel were. We sat infront of a camera everyday and you could get a good feel for who we were because those videos came from our hearts and not from a script.

That sense of culture has definitely been missing from this site so we set about adding a bit more of who we are to the team page. A light hearted 'who what how when' has been included below each of our videos as well as a short company bio at the top to tell you what Obox is and where we came from.

We have decided to lean on the fact that we are a small, close knit and passionate team so expect more of this to come through as we continue to evolve the site.

Affiliate page with less fat around the edges

The previous Affliate page was babble all round. We could barely understand what we were saying, so we cut out all the uneeded copy, added some screenshots and made the page more visual. The result has seen a significant increase in Affiliate sign ups. Win.

(By the way, we have updated our Affiliate banners, they are hot: click here for more deets.)

Some Forum management updates for improved support

Creating a custom forum can be quite tough. The Obox forums are all our own IP and we constantly work on upgrades. The most significant upgrade that we have made recently is improving admin control so that we don't lose track of questions and bugs.

The introduction of a Pending button and Thread locking will greatly improve our response and management of the forums. Whew.

We have also tightened up the typography to make it easier on the eyes (very subtle changes but that is the point).

Checking out, Now a one step process

A slick checkout process is pure gold on an ecommerce site. Get it wrong and you lose sales. When we work on the site, 60% of the time it is spent on refining our checkout, I am not sure you realize how critical your copy can be. Be careful with those words people, an "and" or "the" can do more than you think.

Our process is now a one step affair (well until you get to 2Checkout) and if you choose not to register, it can be as little as a two click affair. Insane refinement, clear copywriting and easy 'extra theme' selecting have been our focus. The results have spoken for themselves...

Some other stuff

Those were the most significant changes. In other areas we have changed the layout of our comment section and improved the user experience of commenting (read the copy above the comment form after you leave a comment).

We have also replaced the one or two areas where Georgia was used with Droid Serif (such a hot font). On our theme listing page we have tagged each theme with the platform they were created for, to avoid confusion.

The End.

So there you go, in the end some of these are subtle changes but they have definitely yielded better results. As always, it is the little things which make all the difference. Often the case is tiny refinements here and there can add up to something big. So keep that in mind when you do your next design and always leave room for improvements, design for the future.