Richard Castera

Usability testing is a technique used to evaluate a product, service or website by testing it on users and it's good practice to perform tests in combination with Split testing. Having an e-commerce site myself, I had to pay special attention to the elements on pages and where my products are positioned in relation to the page. There are so many variables involved in optimizing the usability of page such as dimensions, colors, copy, etc. If users cannot find your product, then they cannot buy it either.

There are many methods for studying usability, but the most basic and useful is done through user testing. Here are some tools to help you in studying if your missing out on sales, and what you can do to improve conversions.

When using the LIKE keyword in a MySQL query, I use it the most typical way, LIKE '%STRING%'. One day, I was in need to use a column name instead and could not figure out how to do it! At first, I tried to just replace the string value with the column name like this, LIKE (%t.column%). The end-result was not good as the LIKE keyword expects a string.

So, I thought of trying the CONCAT() function since that returns a string. And it worked!

 LIKE CONCAT('%', t.column) 

Hope this helps someone!

Ever wanted to get the total price of items in your Magento cart? Here you go:

<?php echo $this->helper('checkout')->formatPrice(Mage::getSingleton('checkout/cart')->getQuote()->getGrandTotal()); ?>

You can use Google Analytics to track clicks on links that lead away from your site. Because links that lead away from your site are not automatically tracked, you will need to manually tag all outbound links you want to track. To do this, you'll add some JavaScript customizations to your page and to the links you want to track.