Sorry! Landing Page Study Questionnaire Problems Entirely My Fault

By Anne Holland, Content Director

Oh, blech. I promised my new bosses at Sherpa when they let me move from the US head office to work virtually from a home office in Serbia that there would be no problems.

"You won't even know I'm gone. I'll have a great Internet connection, and I'll work away writing new Handbooks for Sherpa busy as a bee," I swore. Which was completely true, except for the Internet connection. Turns out in our little town you can't buy bandwidth faster than about 235 kilobits per second, a speed that testing site BandwdithPlace.com told me is "mediocre."

This isn't a problem when I'm writing a Handbook, which is what I spend 90% of my workday doing. However, when it came time to put an official MarketingSherpa Questionnaire online for you guys to take to give your own input on the topic of Landing Pages ... I just couldn't face doing it myself.

It would have taken 10 hours. So, I took the lazy woman's way out. I emailed my draft questionnaire to the new guy (i.e., the only one with a little open time) in our New York research department and fell on his mercy. Thankfully, he helped out.

Then, he asked me to test the questionnaire before we launched it to find any problems, because the last thing you want to do when sending a questionnaire to 237,000 of your closest readers is to send something that's broken. OK, now you can guess the depths of my underachievement during the testing process.

All I can say is the bandwidth drove me temporarily nuts.

Now I have two favors to ask you:

Favor #1. Please come and take the questionnaire now if you didn't get a chance before. The problems are all fixed, thanks to our New York research team. Yes, we'll send you all a copy of the Executive Summary with new charts in a few weeks:
http://s-r3cij-14367.sgizmo.com
(Closes Thursday, September 13th, because that's such a lucky date.)

Favor #2. Please *forgive* me for my pre-testing delinquency if you tried to take the questionnaire last week. I will not ever, ever make that same mistake again. Yes, we do have your answers on file if you submitted, even if you got a weird loop instead of a nice "Thank you" page.

Oh, and one last thing:

Please, please take a look at your own site's load speed with the comp analyzer you can get at WebSiteOptimization.com. Turns out that although 93.99% of US workers have high bandwidth, only 53% of US consumers do. The rest are feeling the exact same pain I do whenever I visit your site. Actually, it turns out that nearly one out of five Americans online feel a lot more pain because they're still on 56k dial-up. Ouch!

Thank you.