Possible to have different versions of asp:menu control for GWO experiment?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Jay Williams
  • Start date Start date
J

Jay Williams

Hi, our marketing department is working with a Google Analytics consultant
and as part of that they are using the Google Website Optomizer expirements
to increase conversions to different pages. I don't know a lot about GWO
experiments, but apparently there is some javascript that checks cookies,
makes a request to Google and then swaps out sections of a page that you
surround like so:

<script>utmx_section("SOME_SECTION")</script>
SOME SECTION OF YOUR SITE YOU WANT TO APPEAR DIFFERENTLY
</noscript>

Anyway, this all seems farily trivial if you have complete control over the
rendering of the page and are trying to swap out something easy like a story
headline or a image or something. What our consultant is proposing though
is the expirement move a section of our menu (asp:menu control using
web.sitemap as datasource) from a 3rd level to the 2nd level. I don't see
how this is going to be possible because the menu is not created from a
javascript file being included on the page (like some menu controls) but is
generated server side. If it were generated client side it would seem it
would be simple as we could just change which javascript file gets included.

Is it going to be possible to do what they are proposing? Any ideas? Here
is a better example of how the menu is and how they want it to display for
some users during the experiment.

TOP LEVEL MENU ITEM 1
2nd LEVEL MENU ITEM 1
3rd LEVEL MENU ITEM 1 (this item should be moved to the same level
as it's parent)
TOP LEVEL MENU ITEM 2
....
 
Jay Williams said:
Is it going to be possible to do what they are proposing? Any ideas?
Here is a better example of how the menu is and how they want it to
display for some users during the experiment.
Click to expand...

Get the CSS friendly adapters and get the menu, from the Menu control, to
render as lists with CSS for formatting. After you do that, you can whack at
the CSS to move 3rd level up to 2nd rather easily, esp. if you stick with
the default class-heavy implementation from Microsoft.

Going this route, you don't have to reinvent the wheel to make the
consultant happy. Another option is derive from the Menu control and take
over its rendering. If you go this route, consider open sourcing it, as I am
sure there are others who would like to see a menu control that is a bit
more flexible in this respect. You will find, when you open source, most
people are leechers, however, so don't expect a lot of help. :-)

--
Peace and Grace,
Greg

Twitter: @gbworld
Blog: http://gregorybeamer.spaces.live.com

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