Building business websites for budding web professionals

books:


	• Web Design for ROI: Turning Browsers into Buyers & Prospects into Leads Lance Loveday, Sandra Niehaus New Riders Press, 2007 - 216 pages average customer review:based on 24 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Building business websites for budding web professionals

I purchased this book because I need some insight how to design compelling landing pages and web sites for online marketing in the computer software industry.

It gives examples how a lot of the popular sites are becoming social utilty sites that enable customer service based on the reviews, how things are done and what kind of techniques work when buyers want to buy certain products or services.

This book gives an overview and comparisons how websites have better and compelling websites for ROI. This is a good resource and reference for a budding web professional who knows little about online marketing. She also gives helpful tips on several situations.

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An excellent resource

I have been in the Internet marketing business since 1995. I have heard many speakers at Internet marketing conferences and read many books on website design and marketing. I had a chance to hear Lance when he spoke at the MIMA conference in Minneapolis and identified immediately that his approach to website development was different.

As the book states: "Our experience indicates very few sites are designed with ROI in mind ..." I couldn't agree more!!! As an Internet marketing practitioner, I have been asked to provide a broad range of services - many of which are focused on a false perception that designing a site so that it gets organically ranked #1 in Google is the key to success for online marketing. While it may help drive traffic, if the website on the other end of the Google click isn't scratching the potential customer's itch, then that exercise in getting to the top of Google (or any search engine) was nothing more than an exercise in ego gratification.

This book is about the big picture - about getting the most out of your website development costs by identifying the key components that drive not traffic, but conversions. It helps to explain how and why a website must include a strategy that supports the entire business enterprise. It offers design guidelines and resources; all in support of maximizing a company's return on investment.

As it states on the website of the writers, "Your web site is a business - design it like one." This book provides excellent examples of how to go about accomplishing this objective.

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Clear, Concise & Actionable

As a small search engine marketing company, we have been looking for years for a true guidebook to hand out to our clients on how to improve conversion rates. I am quite sure we have found it now with this book. In fact, we have purchased several copies and hand delivered them to the web teams AND marketing teams across the organizations at each of our clients. By reading the clear, concise and actionable guidelines and examples set forth in the book, a light bulb has gone off in many of their heads. As the book shows, it's not just about driving traffic anymore. It's also what you do with that traffic that is really what enables successful online marketing. With higher conversion rates already (with just a few of the authors' minor best practices employed), we have been able to open the flood gates even more on the traffic flow since it is now converting better.

I truly think this books does the best job of outlining the process for improving online conversion rates for the modern web marketing world of any that I have read.

That is why we definitely recommend this book. It can be read, understood and acted upon by folks across entire management, marketing and web organizations. I just hope more online marketers and clients leverage it as it makes our traffic generation piece that much more successful.

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This one will be on my shelf for a while!

EXCELLENT book for business focused websites! I've read it once already and have exhausted my post-it flags marking pages. A great starting place for creating a profitable website - just don't expect to "get rich quick". This book doesn't promise to make you a millionaire overnight, but it does give you solid tools to build a successful business presence on the web. Not a programming manual or template book, just solid advice on how to do it right!

Concise, Accessible and Do-able

What's the most important thing you can do with any technical book? Apply what you learn, of course. Lance and Sandra's book makes it easy to do just that. I'm a professional designer/developer and I appreciate any resource that can help me explain to clients and customers why it's important to make the changes I recommend. The concepts in this book are concise, understandable and completely do-able. I can say to clients, "See, look at the percentage jumps in conversion rates they got by moving that item above the fold. What do you think would happen if we did that for your site?".

I had the opportunity to hear Lance speak at Web Design World Seattle in 2006, and the group of professional web developers and designers I was with all agreed that Lance had one of the best and most useful seminars(if not the best) of the conference. He even made an electronic interruption funny when a friend IM'd him with a banal comment(whew!) in the middle of his presentation.

So when my copy showed up, I immediately dug in, and started gleaning concepts for a new ecommerce site I'm launching called Bluetoothit.com. The difference this time is that as Lead Designer, I get to implement the improvements! Yee-haw! No long meetings and no VP of Marketing saying, "But I like the gray one better". Right off the bat I took some of the easy things to do (return policy link on the details page...brilliant!) and implemented them on our new site.

One more thing: Lance and Sandra's book hits a very important, but oft-overlooked concept in design efforts: Return On Investment. That is, how does a company or design team prioritize and balance all the competing interests in a design initiative to maximize profit? "Easy...," I can hear Lance saying, "...just look at the numbers." They make web analytics accessible by simplifying and showing the formulas behind the calculations. For a non-numbers guy, I loved it. And you can tell they are fans(who isn't?) of Steve Krug, author of Don't Make Me Think, by the easy layout and solid, up-to-date design examples pulled from the web with clear descriptions. (I think the book designers could have added chapter numbers to the vertical "tabs" for easy reference, but that's a small point). It has solid sourced references, and my favorite feature of all: "Stop Reading and Try This/Featured Technique" - you can actually take immediate action from what you have just read about. This alone is worth the purchase price of this book. Buy this book, you won't be disappointed.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5

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