If you follow our newsletter, you probably know that my other love is urban planning. I was thinking about why I'm interested in both software development and urban planning, and I realize that they're similar in quite a few ways.

Effective project scoping is incredibly important. Setting clear expectations and guardrails are important for any project, but especially valuable for clients that are not experts in the field and cannot devote full attention to the project. This can prevent miscommunication and conflict down the road (especially on payday)!

Once you've created and validated your hypothesis for optimizing your conversion rate, you can finally move on to the testing phase of CRO! I know we've spent a lot of time talking about double-checking your assumptions before getting to implementation, but I think that a "measure twice, cut once" philosophy is very valuable here.

If you provide professional services for clients in your network, you may be wondering: do I even need a website? Since most of your business comes through referrals and personal relationships, it may not seem like a website is necessary. However, the answer to this question is not black and white. Instead, you should think of your website in terms of Return on Investment.

A/B Testing is a process where a company will change an element of its site for different users and see which version of the element performs better. For example, 50% of people will see a red button and 50% of people will see a blue button. The company will then see which color button gets more clicks and use that permanently on the site. This is an accepted best practice for big companies who are trying to maximize sales on their e-commerce platforms.

I have still been shocked at the range and seeming randomness of the price points for different potential clients. The main cause (in my opinion) is the general lack of knowledge that non-technical founders have about how much effort different web development tasks take.

A lot of conversion rate experts discourage businesses from blindly adopting best practices from other websites because there are too many complex variables. Even if you are comparing to other websites in your industry, there can be significant differences in your customer base, price expectations, and UI preferences that will affect your conversion rate differently.

One of my first projects that I worked on as a freelancer was to help a friend's business optimize conversion on their e-commerce site. They were seeing decent traffic but a very small number of visitors actually bought something on the site (<1%). This was our first project of its kind here at Dedicated, and we identified a series of UI/UX improvements that we thought could help improve conversion.

This is a metric provided by Shopify that tells you “how quickly your customers can shop”. It tracks how quickly your site loads for your actual users and assesses its performance. A high Speed Score means that your site loads relatively quickly, while a low Speed Score means your site loads relatively slowly.

So you're getting ready to launch your e-commerce store and you have everything ready. You've built your site, you have product ready and supply chain process ironed out, and all you need to do is set up some marketing emails. Sounds easy, right? Not so fast.

As a non-technical founder, it can be difficult to make your first technical hire, whether it's for a full-time employee or a contractor. If you hire a designer who can't build web experiences, you may end up with beautiful designs and no website. If you hire a developer who can't design, you might be left with a website that is difficult or impossible to use, has low conversion rates, and just looks ugly.

Let's say that you are running an e-commerce business and sales are just not reaching the numbers you are hoping. You want to increase sales, but there are so many things you could change, you just don't know where to start. Here's how we would approach this problem here at Dedicated.

E-commerce sites are digital storefronts. In the same way that brick and mortar stores invest in having good signage, attractive window displays, and clean store layouts, e-commerce stores must optimize their website design. You wouldn't go into a dusty, rundown store, so why would you shop on a clunky, disorganized website? There are few aspects of e-commerce stores that are important to attract customers and drive sales.

Making major decisions about your business's digital presence can be stressful. Building websites is expensive, time-consuming, and a difficult decision to reverse. Plus, the confusing jargon makes it hard to choose the right approach for your business. One of the earliest big decisions you need to make is what platform to build your website on.

Email marketing is one of the best ways that e-commerce sellers can interact directly with their customers. A good email can build brand loyalty, make customers excited about new products and opportunities, and drive repeat sales.