Testing and optimizing a digital property - be it a website or application - may not seem nearly as cool or edgy as designing or promoting it, but it's quickly becoming the most important aspect of digital initiatives for the modern enterprise. It's the last opportunity Internet professionals have to make a positive difference to their companies, products and brands' bottom lines.
As an industry, we're not basing decisions on gut instinct anymore, but, instead on empirical data - and that's a good thing. Those responsible for testing and optimization play an integral role in the performance and long-term success of their enterprises. It's not easy to make a case for testing and optimization, however. As a result, in small- and mid-size enterprises in particular, those initiatives rarely get the budget. The reason? Essentially, there's no single definition, and it can be hard to wrap your virtual head around.
It's a broad field that encompasses many different areas, from the purely technical to the more ephemeral notion of "user experience" and how it plays into something as tangible as conversion. That is beginning to change of course. A study of 1,500 global IT decision-makers by Capgemini and Hewlett-Packard found that by 2014, quality assurance testing is expected to consume as much as 28 percent of the IT budget - up five percentage points from 2013.
In this edition of Website Magazine's Top 50, readers will find solutions that are capable of satisfying a wide variety of testing and optimization scenarios - from the informal and qualitative to the formal and quantitative. There are solutions for understanding how websites appear in different browser and operating system combinations such as BrowserStack.com, A/B testing platforms like Unbounce.com and VisualWebsiteOptimizer.com, as well as solutions that measure the technical performance of digital properties including Compuware.com and Yottaa.com.