A must read for any of your doing, or thinking about site development appeared today in User Interface Engineering blog, concerning how changing one button on an e-commerce site resulted in increased sales of $300 Million dollars a year.

Of course this happened to a major, unnamed online retailer which already had customers, traffic and business.

But by changing one button on the site’s layout, they found the number of customers purchasing went up by 45%. The extra purchases resulted in an extra $15 million the first month. For the first year, the site saw an additional $300,000,00 in sales.

The bigger lesson here, is that a very small change in your site can lead to tremendous results.

Even if your site is successful, you should have a fresh set of eyeballs to critic your site to see if there something that could be done better, experiment by tinkering with the site to find the best results, keep an open mind.  The best set of eyeball maybe one of a customer or inexperienced user.  Generally when we ask someone to look over our site, we ask our friends and colleagues, most of whom are highly experienced internet users.  We tend to forget that millions of our potential customers still use AOL because its “easy” (including many of my relatives) and have whole different perspective than we do on site layout and ease of completing transactions.

Go read the article now.