The GigaOM Network today announces its second Structure conference after the runaway success of the 2008 event. The Structure 09 conference returns to San Francisco, Calif., on June 25th, 2009.

Structure 09 (http://structureconf.com) is a conference designed to explore the next generations of Internet infrastructure. Over a year ago, The GigaOM Network Founder Om Malik saw that the platforms on which we have done business for over a decade were starting to provide diminishing returns, and smart money was seeking new options. Structure 09 looks at the changing needs and rapid growth in the Internet infrastructure sector, and this year's event will consider the impact of the global economy. "I cannot remember a time when a new technology had so much relevance to our industry as cloud computing does in the current economic climate," said The GigaOM Network Founder Om Malik. "We all need to find ways to leverage what we have and cut costs without compromising future options. Infrastructure On Demand and Cloud Computing are very strong avenues for doing so and we will look for what practicable advice we can bring to our audience."

"Structure 08 was a great experience for our audience and partners, and I am very pleased to be bringing it back again this year," said Malik. "Along with GigaOM Lead Writer Stacey Higginbotham and the conference program committee, I am bringing together what I intend to be one of the most authoritative programs for the cloud computing and Internet infrastructure space."

The GigaOM Network is also announcing early speaker selections. Confirmed speakers include:

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Your site may be getting a lot of traffic from referring sites, but which websites refer visitors that actually convert to a goal? There’s a basic report that can show you where your quality traffic is coming from: the Traffic Sources report.

To spot which website links are referring visitors that convert to your goals, follow these steps:

1. On the main ‘View Reports’ screen, choose Traffic Sources in the lefthand navigation.

2. In the same area you'll now see a list of subset of reports. Click on 'Referring Sites.'

3. Now you'll see a report of all the top sites that refer traffic to you ("referral" = the user clicked a link on the sourcesite). Click on the Goal Conversion tab.

4. Now you'll see the top 10 referral domains. In the bottom gray section, choose a larger number for 'show rows' in order to see them all.

5. You'll get a breakdown of goal conversion percentages for every referral. Right above the data table, you'll see a score card listing your site average's data so that you can compare it to the information coming from specific sources.

Of course, for this report to actually show goal conversion data, you’ll need to have created goals for your website. You can either read a quick how-to from our Help Center, watch a video, or view a GA IQ learning module on it.

If you run an ecommerce site and would like some more information on identifying valuable referrers, you may want to check out this post written by one of our Authorized Consultants.

One of the reasons WordPress 2.7 was such a success is the amount of usability testing that took place during the development cycle. Starting with testing 2.5 and the Crazyhorse prototype and following with the 2.7 beta, the testing program looked at almost every feature and function in the application. That kind of thing? Takes a lot of time.

For readers who aren’t familiar with the process behind usability testing, here’s an overview. First, determine the scope of your test and create a test protocol/script. Determine the audience segments to be included in the test group(s), and begin recruiting. Recruiting may mean hiring an agency to find participants, but for testing WordPress, it makes more sense to recruit from within this community, so that means making a screening survey, reading all the responses, segmenting the respondents into categories and contacting people until you’ve filled your desired quotas (for whatever segments you’re seeking, such as newbie, experienced user, developer, CMS user, photoblogger, mobile user, etc. ). Then come the test sessions.

Depending on what is being tested, these last anywhere from half an hour to an hour and half apiece. Sessions are generally recorded using screen capture and web cam, with a video camera for backup. The moderator(s) generally take notes during sessions and/or (depending on what software is being used for the session capture) set markers in the video to indicate task completion, comments of interest, etc.  In some cases, auxiliary test methods such as eye-tracking may be included. When the sessions are complete, the results are analyzed. All the notes and videos are reviewed, patterns are identified, and ultimately a report is written and the feedback informs the next round of revisions.

Some people think it shouldn’t take much time to do all this. I’ve lost count of the number of people who cite an old article by Jakob Nielsen that says you don’t need to test with more than 5 users because usability issues become clear right away. While I’ve found that to be generally true, when your user base is as diverse in experience level, usage, platform  configuration, language (right to left languages have a pretty different experience) and demography as the WordPress community is, 5 users really isn’t enough to get a clear picture. We try to test with at least a dozen people each round, but then we are limited to a geographic region (test in NY, test in SF, or test wherever we can schedule enough people back to back to make it worthwhile), while WordPress users are located all over the globe.

To address this, we’re introducing a set of new contribution opportunities to expand our usability testing program. As with development and graphic design, we’re going to create an infrastructure to allow community participation in usability testing on a regular basis and in a much broader capacity than existed before, when it was limited to announcements that we needed participants in x city on y date. We’ll be looking for volunteer moderators as well as participants, hopefully from all over the world.

Moderators. Observational usability testing isn’t rocket science, but neither is it a simple task to reduce bias. Because of this, at first we’ll choose only moderators who have professional experience conducting usability tests. People who conduct testing for design agencies, software companies, usability consulting firms and the like will be our first round draft picks. In the future, when we have a group of regular volunteers and have ironed out any kinks in the process, we’ll ideally match up experienced testers with aspiring ones, using a mentorship model to increase the number of people who can contribute in this fashion.

Participants. If you use WordPress, chances are you could participant in a usability test at some point. In some cases we’re looking for particular behaviors (people who upload large video files, people who blog from their iPhone, people who manage more than 5 blogs, etc.), while other times the behaviors we’re looking for are much more common (do you have widgets in your sidebar, have you changed themes in the last 6 months, is there more than one author on your blog, etc.).

So how will these opportunities come into play, and how will it make WordPress better?

We’ll start with the moderators, and try to get volunteers with a decent geographic spread. Then, we’ll start signing up potential test participants in those areas (though we’ll also allow at-large registrations, since traveling testing will still be happening). We’re working on a registration process for potential participants. You’ll enter your basic info (location, contact info) and answer some questions about your WordPress usage to be entered in the database, and when there’s a testing opportunity coming up that’s appropriate for you, a local moderator will get in touch to see if you’re interested. Further down the road we may experiment with remote testing and other methods, but for now, this approach will broaden the geographic scope of our testing.

All moderators will follow the same test protocols and script, and their results/reports/video will be reviewed and collated, with a composite report (including the protocol/script that was used) published to the community. This will provide designers and developers with broader feedback during the dev cycle, and will allow the wider community to both understand and participate in the testing program.

If you’re interested in being a moderator during this initial phase (meaning you do it professionally), send me an email and introduce yourself. If you’re interested in signing up as a potential test participant, watch this space. We’ll post a link to the registration survey once it’s ready.