Techy? Sometimes. Funny? Often. Relevant? Always.

This is the 2nd installment of my day here in snowy, cold Chicago which I got to experience first-hand after all the sessions were over. But enough of that, let’s get into what I learned today.

KEYNOTE:  Peter Morville who is the author of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web and Ambient Findability. He spoke on search and how it is a way in which we learn; however, it is becoming more and more difficult to really find what we are looking for. He does not believe that artificial intelligence is the way to solve the problem because search is a human problem and something that needs to be solved by humans. He also believes that even though we have made improvements from the past (auto-complete from Google or auto suggest from Yahoo!) we are still a long way from solving the problem and we may actually never fully solve the problem.

SESSION 1:  Information Architecture with Shari Thurow and Kimberly Krause Berg. Both spoke on the importance of information architecture within the scope of developing a website and how the SEO professional should be involved from that step to make sure that it is keyword focused – not stuffed, but focused. A lot of times we believe that information architecture is navigation, but in fact, navigation is just a part of it. Information architecture involves navigation, usability, interlinking, prioritizing, etc.

KEY TAKEAWAY –You MUST have your information architecture developed before any type of design or development process can be done on your website.

SESSION 2:  The 7 Deadly Sins of Landing Pages by Tim Ash. He started out by having us all say “Your baby is ugly!” referring to your landing pages on your website. He went through the 7 sins including “Unclear call-to-action”, “Too much text”, “Asking for too much information,” etc.

KEY TAKEWAY — The thing I learned from most though was that you have to get someone elses’ eyes to look at your landing page. Many times we have looked so much at our landing pages that we don’t see anything wrong with them, but if you get someone else to look at it (especially your users) then you’ll get a different perspective and can figure out what “sins” you are committing so you can fix them.

SESSION 3:  A q/a type session with Sage Lewis. He had a booth set up in the Expo Hall and was taking questions from a group of people on how to better optimize their sites. He would look at people’s websites and give them practical ways in which to improve their site.

KEY TAKEAWAY: Tips on how to optimize worthwhile.com

SESSION 4: Turning Simple Change into Big Profit with Matthew Bailey, Bill Hunt, and Kayden Kelly. They gave a lot of practical ways in which to change small things on your site to improve the conversion rate. A few sites they referenced for help were www.crazyegg.com and www.clicktale.com which can give you an overview of where people are clicking on your site so you can see where your visitor’s eyes are going on a particular page. The information you receive can help you figure out why people are not converting. Maybe they aren’t seeing the call-to-action button or they are clicking on an area that isn’t clickable that you should make clickable. Matthew Bailey gave some practical advice on content – make it concise, scalable, and objective. He gave an example of a company he worked with in which he did they tried to do just one of the three items and the conversion rate would increase by about 25 – 40% but when he did all three to the content it increased the conversion rate by 124%.

KEY TAKEAWAY: Content and call-to-actions are key to conversions.

The biggest thing I have learned through these two days has been that you have to constantly test your site. You’ll never know if what you are doing is successful unless you test. Also, both the 2nd and 4th sessions mentioned that your users should be the ones designing your site — not the big wigs or the marketing department, but your users! They are the ones using it and if you design a site that they aren’t going to like using then you aren’t going to be successful.

Tomorrow is the last day of the conference and I am betting it proves to be another good day of learning!