I came across a useful free tool for creating heatmaps of your website design at Feng Gui.   The site allows you to type in your url or upload an image and it creates a heatmap based on what it thinks a real human would be most likely to look at.  The application uses a ViewFinder algorithm to create a saliency map based on objects in the field of view that stand out relative to neighboring items. 

Recently Feng GUI released the results of a study that they say proves the accuracy of the application.  According to the study, the heat maps produced capture 70% of what a traditional eye and mouse tracking application would show. 

I see this tool being useful for early and often testing of new layouts and designs.  Because it’s much quicker and cheaper than running a eye tracking test with multiple subjects, you can use this application at each iteration of a design to see if you are getting the desired results.   I don’t think it can be a true replacement for eye tracking, as the heat map only produces a static moment in time showing the highest areas of interest.   It doesn’t give you any insight whether humans will have difficulty navigating your site, understanding your product details pages or filling out the checkout form at the end of a transaction. 

Changing the label at the bottom left corner to Retail Vertical will show the top use of Flash by retail category instead.

Update: I’ve moved the visualization to after the click as it was too much on the homepage.

The data came from my top ecommerce sites mashup.

 An alternative interesting view can be see by dragging the retail vertical to the position between google page range and site.  This will group everything by page rank showing that there’s only 4 retailers with a GPR of 9. 

Update: I’ve moved the visualization to after the click as it was too much on the homepage.

Check out the dataset and visualizations at http://services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/topichub/mAgULsOtha6IBFTvcOgL2-.

The data came from my top ecommerce sites mashup.

 It’s a good time in the year to look at your site and determine if you are compliant. 

Please check out The Top Ecommerce Sites and let me know what you think. 

Currently I’m tracking on each site:

• Snapshots of the home page
• Google Page Rank
• Backlinks from major search engines
• Traffic via Compete
• Company data from ZoomInfo
• Types of technology used and sizes (i.e. html, images, flash, javascript)
• User submitted comments and reviews
• 1-5 Star ratings submitted by users
• References in the Blogosphere
• Google News

I plan to track in the future:

• Catalog features of each site (i.e. Reviews, social aspects, single page checkout)
• Stock & finance information
• Other traffic sources
• Open jobs
• Competitors
• Snapshots of other pages like product detail for historical reviews

The site, data, and code is still beta, so problems may come up.  If you see any, please send me a note of what you see and I’ll look into fixing it. 

Please contribute to the resource by rating and writing a review for some of the sites.  I’m primarily looking for thoughts on design, SEO, structure and ability of the sites.   If you have a blog or website, the reviews are set to follow, so in exchange for your review, you’ll get get a link back to your site.   Every comment is moderated for spam and foul language prior to it being published. 

If you have any thoughts, ideas on features or api’s that would be useful, or questions you would like to ask, please send me an email (link in the sidebar).

Last, a note of thanks out to Suresh.  I appreciate your help during late nights and weekends helping me put this together.    It’s appreciated.

Personally, I’m having fun looking at the search results that google is providing.  It’s interesting to look at the various ecommerce sites and their SEO optimization as it is clearly coming into play here.  When you take out the millions of other pages google would have included in the mix, you can start to compare multiple retailers and how they’ve been optimized for organic search.

I’ll have the top ~ 500  ecommerce retail websites in the search engine by Tuesday or so.  I’m currently up to 128 for testing purposes.  The top 500+ ecommerce sites in the US are currently in the search engine which should give a wide array of stores to search.   Over time I’ll add & subtract from the overall list to improve the searching.

I have another search engine in the works for retail industry research.  It should be done in the next week or so. 

If you try it out, please send me an email or leave a comment on how well it works for you.  I’m still trying to tweak it.