Kyle Rush

I like the following: http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/ http://marketingexperiments.com http://whichtestwon.com/ http://kylerush.net/blog/optimization-at-the-obama-campaign-ab-testing… (previously mentioned)

Separate from the morality/public service bit (which I agree with rayiner about), I think it's interesting that public sector work is often the most demanding and rewarding (not in a feel-good sense) work out there. Usually this is equated with law/diplomatic positions, but I think there's something about the low-budget quick-turnaround nature and general sense of gravitas that brings out the best work of people. I hope Code for America (http://codeforamerica.org/about/) expands and starts to fill the same role that Teach for America does -- sacrifice two years of your life that you'd otherwise spend working for BigCo, get a great credential and pick up a tremendous amount of skills along the way. I'm reminded of a really interesting post by Kyle Rush about the challenges he faced developing Obama's 2012 fundraising platform: http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-million-fundrais…

A similar "static site" approach (using Jekyll and Akamai) was used by the Obama campaign's fundraising site. There was a good write-up about it a while back: http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-million-fundrais…

The campaign's site was also static (see http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-million-fundrais…

As has been noted on HN at the time, the front-facing part of the site was released as open-source 3 months ago: https://github.com/CMSgov/healthcare.gov You can deploy it like any other Jekyll site. The code and content has changed since then but I imagine it still has the same static front facing architecture, much like the Obama campaign fundraising site, which famously raised $250M using Jekyll static pages: http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-million-fundrais… So the number of raw visitors may not be the most relevant number, as many of them may have hit the front page and left, or never got around to the signup part. But what exactly was the technology in the back-end stack?

Except the most successful political fundraising machine in history that ran on Jekyll [0] :P [0] http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-million-fundrais…

I think this may be the story you intended to include with your second link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4842510 http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-million-fundrais…

Definitely check out Kyle Rush's report on the optimization of the Obama Campaign's donation page via A/B testing. Here's the link:http://kylerush.net/blog/optimization-at-th e-obama-campaign-ab-testing/

Are you considering a/b testing your sign up form? Not too long ago on HN there was an article about how the Obama web team converted their forms into multi-step forms and noticed an increase in conversions. Maybe add a picture showing what is delivered to your door every month? Just a thought. Good luck guys! http://kylerush.net/blog/optimization-at-the-obama-campaign-ab-testing…

I've only recently heard of jekyll but have been searching or thinking about creating a markdown based blog for a while. I first discovered it through an article on the obama campaign, and how they used it in combination with AWS:S3 http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-million-fundrais… Jekyll is here to stay.

People are looking to static sites more and more for a couple of reasons: 1. speed - you can't beat an optimized static sites hosted on a CDN. In part I suppose the increased focus on speed i driven by mobile traffic. 2. Github - front-end developers have now gotten really used to having everything under version control. Dumping the most important content into an unversioned database just doesn't feel as good as having everything as Markdown in Github 3. Jekyll - or rather build tools and static site generators in general. The combination of GitHub and Jekyll and flag ship projects such as the Obama Campaign platform [1] definitively played an essential role in the growth of static site generators we're seeing now. Our clients range from beginners launching their very first HTML site, over agencies with really cool flows built around Middlemand/GitHub/Draft/Similar services, to companies that are integrating site publishing into their products in various forms. One of the cool examples is a startup doing a site builder for progressive candidates running for national campaigns. They use our API to handle the publishing, and use our form feature for gathering volunteer submissions and contact mails. In general I think publishing a website with a form on it, is one of the most basic features of the web. Making it faster, easier and better is a pretty obvious plus for a lot of people. [1] http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-million-fundrais…

How about Googles Doubleclick (2016): 53% of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than 3 seconds to load [1]. Mobify (2016): For every 100ms decrease in homepage load speed, Mobify's customer base saw a 1.11% lift in session based conversion, amounting to an average annual revenue increase of $376,789. Similarly, for every 100ms decrease in checkout page load speed, Mobify's customers saw a 1.55% life in session based conversion, amounting to an average annual revenue increase of $526,147 [2]. Staples (2014): conversion increase per second [3]. Or the Obama campaign (2012): making the page 60% faster increased donations by 14% [4]. More new studies from recent years can be found at WPO stats [5]. [1] https://www.doubleclickbygoogle.com/articles/mobile-speed-matters/ [2] http://resources.mobify.com/2016-Q2-mobile-insights-benchmark-report.h… [3] http://de.slideshare.net/cliffcrocker/velocity-ny-how-to-measure-reven… [4] http://kylerush.net/blog/meet-the-obama-campaigns-250-million-fundrais… [5] https://wpostats.com/