ABCs fo Muse Testing?

[FrozenCanuck]

Gang,

I'm hoping many of you will share your knowledge to help others on the testing phase. It is so critical, and it is time consuming, therefore we need to do it properly.

In my case, I have at least 2 good ideas to run with right now. I want to measure market potential and in order to do this I need one of those "fake" websites that offers the product but then gives you a "sorry we're out of stock and we'll contact you" messages such as the one Tim created for his speed reading course.

So the question is: Can people please post their "best practice" ideas?

1) what did you use to create a website (template)? I need a novice answer not "use dreamweaver". If you are goign to suggest dw, any simple tricks to make it easy?

2) where did you get good stock photos if you needed any?
3) what code did you need to automate the process or capturing the person's email address in the test phase, so you could contact the customer later
4) what are you avoiding in order to not look amateurish?
5) what did you use for analytics (measuring traffic, etc)

Thanks for any help.

[Vacman]

1) what did you use to create a website (template)? I need a novice answer not "use dreamweaver". If you are goign to suggest dw, any simple tricks to make it easy?

Godaddy.com and Bluehost.com among others have site builder software built in, I also believe that inspirationalwebhosting.com (I may have gotten that wrong, but it's a website made by a member on the board also has site building software.)

Those are easier than dreamweaver and can work well for a test.

2) where did you get good stock photos if you needed any?

www.istockphoto.com is awesome!

3) what code did you need to automate the process or capturing the person's email address in the test phase, so you could contact the customer later

I didn't do this... I probably should have but I just tracked orders to a page I set up after they had entered all their info.

4) what are you avoiding in order to not look amateurish?

Good question... that's pretty subjective, I'd say good page layout, pro pictures. Spelling and grammar checking :) There's a lot to go into and I'm not sure the best way to cover it quickly.

If pressed, I'd say use your judgment, you've probably done enough web surfing to know intuitively. (Someone here might have a better answer.)

5) what did you use for analytics (measuring traffic, etc)

I used Google Analytics, you can find it here: http://www.google.com/analytics/

It's free too.


Hope this helped!

[webgal]

1) I use DW. You can get some good templates that make the job much easier. But I've read a lot of people like xsite pro.

There's also open source like joomla and drupal. If you go with a host that has an auto installer (ie. fantastico), you can download a site in seconds. Adding a "theme" or making changes can be more challenging but there are templates for these as well.

For eCommerce, you might want to look into packages and then manipulate how it looks.

There are even some nice wordpress themes that could easily work for a website. But it depends on the type of website.

2)www.sxc.hu is a stock exchange. And I also have used istock. I make many visuals in photoshop or use a digital camera. Of course, I'm not doing landscape type photos or it would look amateurish.

3)For e-mail capture I use my hosts mailing list feature. It's through mailman. There's also constant contacts who will manage it and you arrange the e-mails and they give you the code for data capture.

4) N/A

5)statcounter.com, google analytics and your host might have awstats. All free.

The first thing you need to do is figure out your target market and work from there.