You may have noticed that the blog has not been working for the last 2 days.  Previous, the blog was based on Blogger.  We had built a custom template to match our site, but their template markup is a real challenge to get working.  A couple tweaks earlier this week was all it took to break the layout massively.

Rather than spend a bunch of time trying to fix it, we spent the same time rebuilding the blog with WordPress 2.7.  And here it is.  Wordpress is great, and we’re excited to have finally made the switch.

Big news! In case you haven’t noticed lately, we have redesigned.  Finally after way too long, we have built a new site at http://www.vertster.com/ The new site contains some of the same content as the old site, and will feature a lot of brand new stuff as well.

The site has a new look and feel, and contains more detailed information about the software and solutions we provide.  In addition, it was built to be extremely fast loading and browsing, something that should get even faster as we tweak it.

Stay tuned in the coming days and weeks as we announce new features at the site.  We will also be diving into some of the exciting new features of the newest Vertster software release.

Warm Regards,

Scott Miller

Just a quick housekeeping note: I upgraded to the latest and greatest version of Blogger today, with moderate success. It appears all my posts and everything made it over okay, but currently the xml file appears to have a formatting issue that my parsing code doesn’t like. In English that means that display of the blog is kind of bunged up on http://www.vertster.com for the time being.

Warm Regards,

Scott Miller, CEO

Author of “The ConversionLab.com,” The worlds first “How to” guide to testing and optimization. Visit http://www.conversionlab.com/ for a special offer!

If you view our blog on the web using Firefox, you’ll know there have been some formatting issues in the last few months. With the 1.5 release of Firefox, the problem got significantly worse. The cause? An unknown change to the way Blogger publishes pages that inserts an empty “clear” div tag was being added automatically. Since I write most of my posts using the excellent w.bloggar software, I never saw that Google had added a new option to revert back to the old way of posting pages.

After a little poking around in the blogger interface, I stumbled on the config setting and now everything works great! I also added my profile information finally.

I decided that “Optimize It!” was a more descriptive name for what we are doing these days. Optimizing marketing response. Rather than focus on just split testing… “Optimize it!” describes the whole mentality, not a specific technique. You can look forward to an increased emphasis on things you can do to your site that will really make a difference, and more discussion of advanced techniques like Multivariate or Taguchi testing.

Since this is my first ever post, I thought it was appropriate to introduce this blog. I will provide a lot of great information, including:

• tips on improving your site effectiveness,
• tricks to boost your sales,
• insights into the e-commerce and web industry,
• links to the best of the best resource and strategies for using split testing and multivariate testing,
• ideas for writing better copy,
• and more!