After an intense couple of days in the blogosphere, we thought we’d lighten the mood. And, I thought what better way to lighten the mood than with - that’s right, some good ole’ fashioned applied nerdery. After all, that’s our shtick.

We’re always looking for new, cool tools to help us hone and refine our site, so when I stumbled upon this one I was psyched. For all of you web and UI (User Interface) designers (or if you’re just plain curious), this is really cool. It’s a service called Crazy Egg (www.crazyegg.com) and it helps you “visualize your visitors.” (It’s also built in Rails by the way.)

(view demo)	(view demo)

It tracks where they click (and how long it took them to click) on the page and displays the results in some really innovative (and useful) ways. This can be invaluable when you are testing different UI designs. (i.e. “What if I put the ‘contact us’ link in the corner? Would that entice folks to click it more?”) My favorites are the “heatmap” view and the “confetti” view. (Try the demo.)

P.S. If you want to go one step further, try out ClickTale (www.clicktale.com). It’s downright creepy. You can “watch” the actual movements of your users as the hover over different elements on the page. Also very handy for UI designing.

Anybody else have any cool tools/services that you find especially useful?

Naysayer note: We’d love for a local Savannah company to provide the kind of service described above. At present, we don’t know of one, but if you do, please let us know! In the meantime, we still think it’s pretty cool and could help many of you and/or your business!

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