Are heat maps the best way to improve your business website?

Image of Heatmap website

When you begin a startup business you are always in testing and building phase.  It is especially important when you have an ecommerce site as you constantly want to improve it.  The hardest part about this is getting feedback from customers or website visitors.  So how do you overcome this problem and what tool or tools can you use?

During the course of setting up our website we came across the term ‘heat maps’. Heat maps to us are a way of analysing visitor behaviour so that you can find ways to increase conversion and improve the website.  Many people think that you need coding skills to set it up but you don’t.

There are two interesting free heat maps that we are using.  They are Heatmap and Hotjar.  Heatmap is mostly a click based heat map, while Hotjar works by tracking people’s eyes when they see your page and clicks.  So what is the difference?

The clicks are visitor actions completed on your page like clicking on images, buy button or social media icons.  While eye tracking is exactly that, tracking the eyes of website visitors as they look at information or images on the page.  The more traffic your site has, the better you are able to understand what visitors are looking for.  It also lets you analyse what is working on your site and why people click to buy certain items.

To install heat maps on your site, all you need to do is sign up and then get the HTML or Java script code.  Once you have obtained the code, you need to inject them in to the ‘head’ section of the website page that you want to track. 

For people who are using Squarespace, all you need to do is to sign in to your account and go to ‘settings’ and then click on ‘Inject code’ and then paste the code in to the ‘head’ section.

As to the question if heat maps are the best way to improve your website, the answer is yes.  Although we have not been using it long, we can see its value.  Facebook is one of the many tech companies who use heat maps.  So when you think about it, if they are using it then there must be some value in it.  Do you believe heat maps improve websites?  What heat map apps do you use or recommend?  Or are they a waste of time?

Is Squarespace the right website builder for your business?

Image of Squarespace website at night

When you are starting out to build your business, most people will either hire someone to build a website or build it themselves due to fact that they do not have enough money to hire a designer.  There are several website builders such as Wix, Webydo, Weebly, Light CMS and Wordpress.  We tried Squarespace’s trail period as a website builder for our startup business.

Squarespace was launched in 2004 by Anthony Casalena.  It is a content management system that was originally composed of a website builder, blogging platform and hosting site.  Since then it has evolved to include ecommerce with Stripe, Google Business apps (optional) and it contains several analytic reports that is very handy for a startup business.

We decided to do it ourselves as we didn't have the money to hire a designer.  Our designated designer found the drag and drop feature very responsive after a while.  The use of blocks and images made the layout of the pages easy to manage and manipulate.  The ability to add our social media channels also gave us more scope to broaden the design of the website.  What we liked most about the system is the ability to see what it looks like on desktop, tablets and smartphones in real time due to the responsive screen feature. 

After a week in to the trial period, we decided to use Squarespace.  Although Wix and WordPress are free to use to design a website.  When we reviewed some of the products out there, we found Squarespace had more features and value for our business.  We decided to take advantage of the service and paid the annual fee. 

We would recommend any business that is starting out and looking for a platform to build their website to use Squarespace.  What website platform builder did you use when you started your business?  Would you use Squarespace after this recommendation?