Hey Folks,

I was in California for a wedding and on the plane trip back I wrote a couple of really good posts for the blog. The kind that can only come from a week of relaxation to recharge the batteries and give you some perspective.

Then I realized that way back on my 30 day challenge to bring more traffic to this website, the most successful method (which I described in the conclusion) was writing guest posts on other blogs.

Why did I stop doing that? So instead of posting them here I decided to shop them around to some blogs with big readership and see if I could get a guest post. If it works, I’ll make sure to link it up here so you can read them.

If you have a blog, I encourage you to try the same strategy….make a guest post.

Tip to making your website easier to use…

In other news, I did a few hours of brainstorming today with a friend of mine who is in the process of launching an online business. He wanted to get my advice on how to improve the site before it goes live.

I can’t give the details yet, but when he launches it I will link it up here. It is a perfect example of a passive income business that is scalable. It’s not an original idea, it just doing something a little better than anyone else, saving people just a little bit of time and frustration. Thats all you need for a good business idea.

Anyway, one of the pages of his site was a sign up form where new users could register. It was fairly typical, a username and password where existing users could sign in, and then a registration form for new users.

Only problem was that the registration form had literally about 25 fields on it, and it looked pretty daunting.

I see a lot of sites do this and it represents a “psychological barrier” for new people to sign up.

How Can You Make It Easy For New People To Sign Up?

Here are a few ideas of ways you can eliminate fields in a sign up form to get the fewest number possible.

• Combine first name and last name into “full name”. You can use some simple code underneath to break it into the separate parts anyway.
• Don’t ask for a fax number. Are you really going to use it?
• Get rid of the “password confirmation”. Most people use the same password on many sites and are very used to typing it correctly the first time. Even if they don’t, what’s the worst that will happen? They can always use your “forgotten password” form.
• Get rid of the username field by having them use their email as their username instead.
• Don’t make a big ole honkin “Terms and Conditions” text area. Just link to it on another page and leave the check box.
• If you don’t absolutely need the information, don’t ask for it!

Here are some examples to help illustrate the point:

Example of a bad signup form…it just makes you want to hit the “back” button

Example of a good signup form…well, I guess I’ll try it out. It only takes a second.

And for the grand finale…check out Amazon.com’s login PLUS signup form all in just 3 fields. Pretty impressive.

What’s the lesson here? If you have any ideas/plans to launch a web business I think it pays to understand good user interface design. The 37Signals blog is a great one to subscribe to if you’d like to learn more of this stuff over time.