Web Design for ROI
| Author | Lance Loveday and Sandra Niehaus |
|---|---|
| Publisher | New Riders |
| ISBN # | 0321489829 |
| Purchase | Amazon |
In my profession(s) as a creative director and freelance web designer, one of the things I have learned about the Web over the years — which people much smarter than me have evidently known for a long time — is that good design shows its true value only after metrics are applied. A company might consider the new redesign of their website to be a huge improvement over the old one, but until quantitative research is done into bounce rates, lead conversions, length of time spent within the site, navigation patterns and other analytics, that high-cost revamp is just another write-off at the end of the tax year. The book Web Design for ROI attempts to help companies look at design pragmatically, and as a means to an end, not an end unto itself.
In the interest of full disclosure, I bought this book for two reasons. First, I am interested in the topic. I have to know this stuff; for better or for worse, I am paid to advise corporate leaders on how to turn their website into a lead / sales generating machine. Second, it always pops up in “Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought” section of my book’s Amazon page (cough). I figured I should at least read books Amazon thinks are complementary.
The first thing you’ll notice is that the book is thin. There are just under 175 pages of real content, then a chapter on additional third-party resources, then an appendix. For what it’s worth, the production quality is top notch — nice printing, good design, full-color spreads.
The authors do a good job of introducing the topic. ROI (“return on investment,” for you marketing noobs) is not always immediately obvious to people who spend their day heads-down in production mode. It’s one of those fuzzy businessy thingies that only execs worry about, right? Well, no.
ROI is really the boldest bottom-line number on the balance sheet when a company makes an investment — if I put X dollars in, how long will it take to recoup that expense, and then how much value will it continue to escalate? (For instance, if I invest $100,000 in a new corporate web presence, and it only returns $25,000 in business in the first year, my ROI for the year is -75%. If it returns $200,000, my ROI is 200%.)
The second half of the book goes into detail about how to design web pages that are built to work toward ROI. The authors wisely admit not all companies seek the same results; some need to drive sales through a shopping cart, others capture visitor information, or collect donations, or just generate leads. The book recognizes and actively identifies these diverse requirments.
Each chapter tackles a layer within the typical website, and details how to develop each for maximum return. These include the following:
- Landing Pages
- Home Pages
- Category Pages
- Detail Pages
- Forms
- Checkout Process
The actual content within these chapters, like the book itself, is fairly thin. Too much of the advice is obvious and common, and focuses (rightly so) on strong usability and clarity of message. Make buttons look like buttons and make the button labels clear. Organize forms intelligently. Make category titles obvious. Make sure detail pages are uncluttered. All of this advice is low-hanging fruit in the world of practical, results-driven web design.
All of the chapters do include some meatier stuff. For instance, there’s information about fundamental metrics sprinkled around — conversion rates, abandonment rates, etc. The end of each chapter also includes exercises for improving design, such as A/B testing, writing scenarios, multivariate testing, and more. And between the obvious usability stuff lies some really smart advice, like putting yourself in the visitor’s shoes when they visit a product detail page, or segmenting landing pages for different audiences.
Yes, this book is good — I just wish there was more to it. For those that live and breathe online marketing, the content might seem sophomoric. For designers, small business owners, generalists and others wanting a primer on what their websites should be doing, Web Design for ROI is a great place to start.
Comments.
Sandra Niehaus
- wrote the following on Thursday February 14, 2008
Ross Johnson
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Larry Lam
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Kevin
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SEO Bedrijven
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