How long did you have the fake sites up? I would have thought you couldn't leave them up for very long before frustrating users, but it seems like you would need a good chunk of data before you would know it was statistically significant. Or did you also have some sort of disclaimer for those users so they knew it was a beta test?
We left the fake sites up for 3 weeks. The parts of the design that required a DB connection, like sorting, pagination, contacting a listing, would just redirect to the matching operation on the live site on click.
Comments
How long did you have the fake sites up? I would have thought you couldn't leave them up for very long before frustrating users, but it seems like you would need a good chunk of data before you would know it was statistically significant. Or did you also have some sort of disclaimer for those users so they knew it was a beta test?
We left the fake sites up for 3 weeks. The parts of the design that required a DB connection, like sorting, pagination, contacting a listing, would just redirect to the matching operation on the live site on click.