Optimizing the Homepage for Giving Tuesday?

[Peter Roach]

Hi –

Do you have any tips for optimizing the homepage experience on Giving Tuesday? We are a nonprofit and have set a lofty goal for this day. We are planning to use a a static page as the homepage that day. I’m wondering if you have any tips.

When I use a static page, we inherit the standard sidebar and I wonder if it’s possible to override that sidebar on that page. I’d like to add a couple videos and maybe some text; like the homepage we have in production.

Do you have any other ideas or best practices I could use?

Thanks, PR

[Peter Roach]

Here’s the page we are working on – http://associatedministries.org/?p=5151

[Bill Robbins]

Hi Peter,

You could use a plugin called JP Widget Visibility. It lets you specify which pages a widget will be visible (or hidden). That way you could set some widgets to show on your special page and the rest for the default.

There’s a lot you can do and experiment with in optimization. I’m a big proponent of A/B testing and have spoken about it a few WordCamps over the years. It’s where you show variations of a page to different sets of visitors and then track the results. To do that you use a company like Optimizely (https://www.optimizely.com) or Visual Website Optimizer (https://vwo.com) both of which allow you to do that visually.

This aspect of the web really took off after the 2008 presidential election. The Obama campaign credited A/B testing with 2.8 million more email sign ups which became 1/4 million more volunteers and an extra $60 million in donations. Not too shabby.

Ideally its something you want to do to get ready for the big day and not so much on the big day. Both of the sites above have lots of resources you can read through to learn about it to help you out going forward.

Hope things go well tomorrow,
Bill

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