This post originally appeared on Dyn.com , a world leader in managed DNS, powering the best brands on the web including Gowalla, Mashable, Twitter, Wikia and more. Follow @DynInc on Twitter. If you need a simple, inexpensive way to figure out what’s going to make your website’s users click on that big, red button, you’ve come to the right place. A/B testing is one of the easiest ways to figure out whether one specific variable of your website is working. It could be a button color, a bit of web copy, an image — something extremely finite that may (or may not) have a measurable impact on desired actions, be they conversions or a simple click-through. In an A/B test, the variable changes as users visit the page; user actions are recorded and analyzed; and the developer (or startup) is able to take action based on the results. A/B testing is generally faster and simpler than other types of testing, allowing a fast-moving startup or solo developer to quickly iterate and improve without wasting too much time on guesswork or esoteric design decisions
It was pretty much all about the cloud at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference, held last week at its Redmond, Wash., corporate campus. CEO Steve Ballmer and other executives spoke about how the software giant's latest developments span the PC, the mobile phone and the cloud. They also highlighted the revamp of Windows Azure as a PaaS offering, pushing it as a next-generation operating system. Microsoft further used the occasion to unveil major changes in its browser with the release of IE9 Platform Preview 6 for developers.