Customer Rating: 
Summary: A GOOD BOOK
Comment: The book is pretty insightful for the price.A good book and has some good information.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Practical Advice for the Financially Focused
Comment: As the title promises, this book gives lots of practical and actionable advice. The first chapter introduces a little theory. There is a short summary of the adoption bell curve made popular by the book Crossing the Chasm There is also a brief anatomy of what happens when things go wrong in terms of office politics.
This book appropriately focuses on what is called in the business "goal conversion" which is converting less desirable user behavior (e.g. casual surfing) into more desirable behavior (e.g. registering, purchasing).
There is a chapter on the two main investment strategies and their potential resulting returns. Basically, you either decide to spend money on advertising and marketing to get more traffic to your site or you decide to spend money on improving the design of the web site which should improve your conversion rate. Obviously, your best bet is a prudent combination of the two.
The rest of the book articulately presents good design advice for the various parts of a typical web site. The advice is always focused on improving your conversion rate and not on what looks cool.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Silicon Valley Web Builder Book Review
Comment: This book is a very handy practical guideline for anyone involved in making any major or minor web design decisions. It demonstrated the importance of prioritizing your web design to RIO rather than the obvious reasons. It addressed the Art of Web Design in a scientific manner with clear objective of each key web site page: Home page, Category page, Detail page, Form page and Check out process.
It demonstrated how small changes in web design convert leads into more sales with very clear objectives, strategies and tactics.
This book is a very light reading with over 200 pages and 10 chapters. The book cover is well-designed and printed in high quality premium paper. It is a very good practical book to read in your spare time and allow you to apply your leaning immediately into your work and capture positive results.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Creating repeatable successes
Comment: I had the opportunity to hear Lance Loveday speak at Web Design World in Seattle. I am very interested in learning how to present hard numbers which support the role of web design. Last December, I created an HTML email which linked to a branded microsite containing success stories and a quiet request for donations. The return that year was 40% above the previous year. I went back to study the campaign from the previous year and compared it to what we did in December of 2007. I had alot of data but did not know how to interpret it until I read this book. I learned from Lance how important it is to have branded landing pages, simple targeted navigation and limit choices for the website visitor (in our case, the donor). Now that I have the words and strategies to explain the success to upper managment, I can also see the areas of the campaign I can improve even more, such as redesigning our form on our donation page and targeting the metrics that truly matter. This book also provides information for understanding web analytics and how they tie into business objectives. The book is well organized and the color screenshots are helpful to visual learners. The best part is now I have business language to sell the importance of what I do that adds value to online campaigns, whereas before all I had was intuition and luck.
Customer Rating:
Summary: a great common-sense checklist for page layouts
Comment: The authors open with a statement that this book is not a checklist. However, I beg to differ. Once you begin to read through the chapters on category pages, individual pages, checkout pages, and so on, you'll realize that they are addressing the main concerns of building pages that properly convert, step by step.
If you run a web site, and you're interested in learning how experienced marketers use design to persuade users to do what you want them to do (i.e. convert), then you should read this book. It's a very straight-forward read, with many screen shots and sample charts used for illustrative purposes. Anyone who owns a web site can benefit from their examples and tips.
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