What are some site changes you thought would work that didn't?
 

Not all changes turn out to be positive. I know over the years we've made a few changes that I was sure would be huge hits that turned into huge flops.

The first one that comes to mind is embedding a trailer/preview video onto the main page of a tour instead of sending the surfer to a trailer/preview video page. I was sure the ease of being able to watch the video on the tour page would be preferred over clicking to a new page. It may have been preferred but it didn't lead to sales.


What are some of yours? This could be an interesting thread :winkwink:

We add trailers to our main pages and it helped sales.

You just did it wrong.

Going back a few years I made a change on Thumbzilla. Thumbzilla always had a warning page, then an ad page, then the site. Obviously there was a huge drop in traffic from the people that hit the warning page to the people that hit the site. I thought it only made sense if we removed the warning and ad page traffic to trades should jump and traffic back to us should jump. Surprisingly that didn't work. Not only did we take a huge hit in revenue (which I expected) but we saw no increase in traffic. I think a big reason was the traffic going in and out after the change was much lower quality and as a result the traffic back was the same or lower.

changed all the heading tags on a popular blog and serps dropped to zero in 3 days...moral of the story use h1 h2 h3 h4 h5 etc

That's very possible.

I know on Tubes changes sometimes make no sense. If we add more thumbs/content to the index page we see a decrease in page views.

I have read a lot of people talking about the use of the videos trailers on the pages. That if you dont do it right it will actually hurt sales. So the best way to go there is Not have one.

Tours are very tricky. What works on one may not work on another. Adding trailers may work until a certain point etc

which makes perfectly sense ;)))

Each page you make them click deeper adds quality.

If a guy is willing to click 3 times to get somewhere you have a good surfer.

You took the work away and turned the quality surfers into free loaders.

http://www.naturalbornswallowers.com/

Notice it doesn't load the player unless you click the static image.

That in a nutshell is the trick. If you force a player load on your main page you will fuck up your conversions.

That is actually something I am wrestling with right now. What have you found works best for you? I'm at 24 now but am thinking I should decease it. I just don't know to what yet. I'll test a few different things but am curious where the sweet spot may be to try first.