DealHorizon - the faster, easier way to create and share business plans

There are three things they say you should never watch being made: sausages, your siblings, and web sites. Having just completed a two month re-work of DealHorizon, we can concur. But, that said, the task of improving one's web site is getting easier - thanks in part to terrific tools like Google Website Optimizer.

During the rework of this site, we used Google's Website Optimizer a lot - and the results were incredibly useful. GWO works by offering up different versions of web pages to users, and looking at where the users go next.

One of the tests we tried resulted in a 450% difference between the original and the variation (test) page - yes, that's right: more than 4x the number of people clicked through to the new page. It turns out, the original page had a horrible bounce rate that we were unaware of. The new variation showed a huge improvement in the number of folks clicking through to the next page of the tool.

How much was changed between the two pages? Here's the kicker: One image. That's it. That's all that was needed to create a 450% improvement. That, and the ability to track our progress.

If you're a ventue capital provider and you recently invested in a company that does a large amount of its sales online, ask them if they're using GWO, and if they're not, what they *are* using to test different versions of the web site.

Between Pingdom.com and GWO, there is a lot a company to do to inform itself about the customer experience, and improve it. And these two tools just touch the surface of what's available - there are numerous other tools that can provide huge benefits, including a fast-growing brand optimization start-up that I'm an investor in called Heardable.com which provides a holistic overview of how well your brand is positioned online.

Given the stuff that these tools are capable of, it won't be long before we can take "web sites" off the list of things we don't want to watch being created. Which will just leave "your siblings" and "sausages" to deal with...