It's not so much the Javascript technique as the beautiful images that help conversions I think.

iStockPhoto I wonder?

Totally :)

Although the "TPS report" one is heavily edited - poll on how many people get that reference?

Lumbergh's gonna have me come in on Saturday, I just know it.

Peter Gibbons, reporting in.

PC LOAD LETTER

I am definitely stealing this. Even if I don't have anything to convert to, the smugness factor is off the charts.

Is this a boost across the board or are there certain hours/day where you're seeing the boost?

Also what was the reason behind JS instead of doing this server-side with php/ruby?

Note -- as a former CV client I can attest that these guys know their stuff.

"Also what was the reason behind JS instead of doing this server-side with php/ruby?"

I would assume it's so they can calculate based on the user's local time settings.

Edit: And here's the JavaScript, for anyone who's curious about the full list of possibilities (you'll need to hunt for the images in the stylesheet). http://www.conversionvoodoo.com/time-home.js

Yep, bang on.

Simpler and faster than trying to do the equation to poll a geo-IP database, build appropriate timing, etc.

Great comment on hours / day.

Since so much of our business is referral based, often it's AFTER we've already been introduced to a specific client that somebody actually looks at the website - totally different conversion funnel.

The unmentioned part of the blog post that you nailed w/that question is that this was as much about hitting those three points (messaging, professionalism, easy to iterate) as it is about actually A/B testing our funnel . . .

What I never understand but also fall for, is how pretty stock photos just make customers trust you. It's crazy and a little creepy.

Put a picture of smiling people hard at work on your page, that are just a stock photo and don't resembled anyone or your actual business, and people instantly trust your company a little more anyway. It's weird.

Loaded fine when I checked it from my cell phone earlier today. But checking again now from my desktop, either this needs more testing or they changed their minds about the feature. It's a black page and firebug net tab shows: GET tps-bg.jpg http://d61fqxuabx4t4.cloudfront.net/tps-bg.jpg 403 Forbidden

Very strange, are you outside of the USA?

Nope. Atlanta, GA, but the IP I was using doesn't show up right on geo ip lists if you were doing reverse lookups. Might show up as chicago, might not show up at all.

Unfortunately, by the time those huge images load, the window is already closed.

Strange - we really optimized the code base and images, hosted on content delivery network etc - should be darn quick.

But a very good illustration of why web page load speed is probably the FIRST and simplest area to optimize - check this for a primer ye who be concerned of their conversions:

http://www.webperformancetoday.com/2010/06/15/everything-you...

The image of the coffee cup (the only one I can bring up) is only 46kb. That loads pretty quick.

What a brave new world we live in, when the words "only" and "46kb" are mentioned next to each other in a positive way when talking about the web.

Am I the only one who balks at including a 5kb JS file, even if I need it? At least, with automatic media managers that merge everything into one file, I don't have to worry about the extra requests as much.

Yep. I don't really see the problem if your market is B2B in the US or Western Europe. Those shopping for their business at work, ought to be using high speed connections (albeit ones that may or may not be saturated by fellow workers).

If your market is developed Asia, then most cellphones have better internet speeds equal to Australian broadband, so that extra 5kb is a rounding error in transmission time.

The lunchtime variant loaded almost instantly for me here (on a relatively slow iPad 1).

On my home cable connection they load in < 1 second.

The lunch image loads almost instantly for me as well... only 67k. Someone seems to have taken some time to tweak the compression of the images to maintain very good quality.