We’re testing an updated site registration form, which we plan to roll out sometime in the next few weeks. The updates are an effort to simplify the form, and are in response to how people have been using PageLime, and what kinds of sites are getting registered the most.

Even though our original site settings form went through countless hours of usability testing, we’ve recently noticed that folks are consistently having trouble with two fields:

1. FTP Home Directory
2. Site Homepage URL

Eventually, everyone gets it right, but that first try is what we’re trying to cut down on. So here’s what we did:

First, when registering a new site, you see this screen:

The idea here is that you should start by specifying the URL of the FILE that acts as your site homepage. So in most cases it will look something like http://www.site.com/index.php. We’ll auto-detect and validate a lot of possible entries. For example, if you type in just www.itislimetime.com we’ll detect that the home page URL should be  http://www.itislimetime.com/index.php.

Once you hit “CONTINUE”, we’ll auto-detect some values, and show you the following screen, which will walk you through the rest of the fields that need to be filled out.

The last field is new, and it’s called “Set the path to index.html on your FTP Server”. In this field, you are being asked to specify the path on your FTP server to the page you selected as your homepage in step 1. The reason we ask for this is to auto-detect your FTP Home Directory.

You might be wondering where all of the other fields that used to be on this page went. You can find them in the Advanced Tab near the top:

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 8:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.