Hundred Dollar SEO

I just finished reading the Lance Loveday & Sandra Niehaus book Web Design for ROI: Turning Browsers into Buyers and Prospects Into Leads and I am looking forward to meeting Lance at SMX West. As promised in an earlier post I am going to do a review of the book.

Web Design for ROI is a Good Introduction.

Reading the intro to this book was refreshing — it plainly stated its goal.

A utopian world where:
• Business leaders to understand web design
• Web Marketers understand usability
• Developers understand the needs of the sites audience
• Web Designers understand business goals and strategies
• Everyone understands metrics

These are lofty commendable goals, but sadly unattainable for one book. Loveday and Niehaus are proposing the equivalent of making a restaurant that is urban chic, coat & tie formal, and kid-friendly at the same time. Cramming everyone into the same space would lead to everyone being under served. Thankfully they chose a consistent voice; a plain language high graphic approach that focuses on business leaders and marketers.

To their credit they do include a “what this book is not” that clearly states that they do not discuss design principles, only concepts that can be employed. So there are no surprises when the topic of design is never actually covered.

What If You Are a Designer?

Never fear they don’t entirely skip valuable design content. As a designer you can make some comparisons of before vs. after images and landing page vs. main site pictures to see designs that employ the concepts found in the book. If the images had been larger I think this could have been more valuable.

Many of the examples that are used are ones that I use when talking about landing pages, like Vonage and Netflix. These pages are used to exemplify elements that are discussed in the book; there is no discussion of why specific elements are important to the audience or when the element might be the wrong decision.

The Bottom Line

Web Deign For ROI is a good book to have in your library next to books like Don’t Make Me Think and Call to Action. It provides a pragmatic description of elements that affect conversion without being overly dense.

Tags:   books · conversion · landing pagesNo Comments

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