Book Review: web design for ROI

Web Design for ROI. Turning Browsers into Buyers & Prospects into Leads

by Lance Loveday & Sandra Niehaus, New Riders, Berkeley (2008)

This booklet covers a couple of interesting topics for product managers or owners of webshops and commercial sites.

The content includes claculation of ROI, conversion of visitors into new accounts or buyers, designing landing pages home pages, category pages, and checkout.

Especially for starters in that area it contains lots of useful detail. It helps to determine and focus on the goals of your site and to ask the right questions, like "Does this site offer, what I want?", "Does this look interesting enough to spend more time on it?", or "Do I trust this company?".

It helps to concentrate on your key metrics, like exit rate, conversion rate, click through rate, etc. and describes, how to calculate and analyze.

To improve the performance of your site, it gives a lot of best practice examples and relevant tipps, like how to introduce yourself, how to structure your site, how to name buttons, how to set up categories and item pages.

As I said, for starters and young professionals its a great guide and practical handbook. Even for more experienced PMs its useful to remind yourself about the basics. But most of the information is quite obvious. Its not getting too deep into very sophisticated area, like complex testing of different designs or flows, clustering and behavioral targeting of users or even web 2.0 elements and how they might help to improve stickyness and retention.

Nevertheless, it provides a rich list of further references and surf tipps for those, who would like to digg deeper.

The authors are internet marketing consultants.

You can get it at Amazon for 39,99 $.