December 3, 2012 at 20:12Site conversion. Turning visitors into buyers
Today we want to introduce you to our next novelty, which this time relates to the field of Internet marketing and web analytics and is devoted to such an urgent topic as conversion and improving the effectiveness of website returns.
Recently, an increasing number of developers, web designers and owners of Internet projects have begun to understand the importance of such an indicator as “conversion”, the percentage of website visitors who have become customers or regular users of a resource. Internet entrepreneurs pay special attention to analysis of project attendance, assessment of site audience behavior and search engine optimization.
In this book, Ben Hunt, considered one of the most influential experts in improving usability and website conversion, offers simple and effective solutions for optimizing Internet projects and taking them to a whole new level of return. The publication consists of two parts. In the first part, the author offers accessible methods (including the basics of usability and search engine optimization) that will help significantly increase site traffic. The second part of the book is devoted to professional techniques that will keep the attention of visitors and turn them into customers or regular users. The publication contains hundreds of tips and tricks, as well as several detailed cases for optimizing individual web pages. Having mastered the material of this book, you will know how to get the most out of your online projects,
Ben Hunt has been in web design since 1994. In the late 1990s, he was the art director of Freeserve, the first mass service provider to provide free Internet access. He has worked for Poulter Partners, a trademark consulting company, and for Dubit, a youth marketing company. As a leading consultant to Scratchmedia, a UK-based web design consultancy, Ben has supported corporations, government agencies, and civil society organizations around the world to help them make great strides by improving design and usability. In his blog on webdesignfromscrath.com, he advises and educates everyone on how to create a simple and effective website design. His articles are known to millions of users, and the author himself is considered one of the most influential figures in the field of enhancing usability. In 2007, Ben talked about his philosophy and design methods in the book “Save the Pixel - The Art of Simple Web Design”.
Part I. Design and traffic
The structure of your website is the most important factor in attracting visitors. The first part of the book shows the errors of most sites and offers a new approach to creating sites that is guaranteed to increase traffic.
Chapter 1. How to make a website successful , which describes typical mistakes of the usual approach to web design and explains why this approach is doomed to poor results. This chapter introduces a new model for creating sites, aimed primarily at potential customers.
Chapter 2. The basics of search engine optimization , which shows how search engines work and what needs to be done so that more people see your site.
Chapter 3. Expanding Coverage, which explains how to change your point of view on the point of view of the client, how to expand the boundaries and enhance the impact of site design.
Chapter 4. Using the recognition ladder , which provides a simple but extremely powerful tool for visualizing your customers, contacting groups of potential customers that you have never contacted before, and how to meet their expectations.
Chapter 5. Work on the recognition ladder , which shows eight real concrete examples, and helps to apply the recognition ladder model in any marketing task.
Part II Design and Conversion
Encouraging people to visit your site is good, but do you need simple visitors or viewers? To find out what makes people choose the answer “yes”, I spent two years devoted to tests and research. Part II will help turn potential customers into real ones by offering techniques, including a simple three-step structure.
Chapter 6. Make the site sell , which shows how to use the funnel transitions to simulate the site to notice where the loss of visitors occurs and what to do if you find “leaks”.
Chapter 7. Attract Attention, which offers a set of techniques for creating web pages that attract the attention of visitors and convince them that it is on this site that they will find what they are looking for. This chapter addresses the basic techniques of graphic design, such as layout, accessibility and presentation, as well as provides the necessary advice for creating effective text.
Chapter 8. Maintain an interest in which you learn the techniques that keep visitors and encourages them to interact with the site. You will find answers to questions about why positive signs are needed, and how to build a trusting relationship and eliminate doubts, how to detect and exclude the reasons why visitors leave the site. This chapter also describes how to create web pages that work with people of different psychological types.
Chapter 9. Call for action , which highlights the critical difference between an entertainment website and a sales website. Most sites simply can not cope with how to timely and correctly ask people to do something. And it is not surprising that only a small group of visitors moves on to action. Effective calls to action must be worked out. In this chapter, you will find six tips for creating effective calls to action. She explains how to create momentum leading to each call to action, how to get visitors to move from one page to another, and how to get them through a key final mark. Tips are backed up by examples of using texts and graphics for maximum effect.
Chapter 10. Website Strategy, which provides step-by-step instructions to help you use the techniques in this book. Whether you are creating a new site or working on an existing one, this chapter will help you start moving towards success.
Chapter 11. Web page optimization , which demonstrates how to test the attractiveness of a website using Website Optimizer, a popular free tool from Google. I offer you a set of practical solutions to which we have arrived in a difficult way and which we have obtained in the course of more than 70 experiments over the past year.
Currently, almost every “sane” business organization has its own website. Having a website is a deliberate necessity, since almost every person conducts their own marketing research on the Internet before spending money. Unfortunately, most websites are simply not able to fulfill the task assigned to them - to serve as a source of convenient information, influence or convince as many people as possible.
But even if your site is a happy exception, it will be of little use, if almost no one visits it. Attendance, or rather, its absence - this is the main trouble of the vast majority of sites. As my former boss David Ogilvy once remarked: "It is impossible to save souls in an empty church." This book will help you solve the "site" problems, and it has several advantages:
Not much time has passed since people who were convinced that the Internet could become a “real” means of transmitting information could fit in at one table. I say this without any exaggeration, because I was one of them. You can’t even imagine how difficult it was in the early 1990s to interest Silicon Valley specialists and representatives of “interactive digital media” in the commercial potential of the Internet.
And as we can see, to date, the contribution and influence of the Internet has far surpassed the wildest assumptions of those years. But there are still a lot of problems.
Unlike print, radio, television or any other way of transmitting information, the Internet is a “transparent” media, that is, the creators and ideological inspirers of sites can really see how their designs affect users. Surprisingly, very few web designers use this simple but very significant fact.
The main reason for this “inattention” is that no one showed them how to track and verify the various approaches, and did not explain why.
Having started writing this book, Ben Hunt set about solving a problem that only a few professionals in the field can do. He managed, abandoning his ideas about web design formed over the years of successful work, to look at the problem through the eyes of a beginner.
This book is before you, the result of his work, and I can safely say that it is as fascinating as everything that I have seen since Mark Andreessen added a tag for inserting images into HTML. The fashion for Internet design comes and goes, and this book will become a solid foundation on which you can build your future.
- Title: Site Conversion. Turning Visitors Into Buyers ( Convert !: Designing Web Sites to Increase Traffic and Conversion )
- Posted by: Ben Hunt
- Release Date: June 2012
Book abstract
Recently, an increasing number of developers, web designers and owners of Internet projects have begun to understand the importance of such an indicator as “conversion”, the percentage of website visitors who have become customers or regular users of a resource. Internet entrepreneurs pay special attention to analysis of project attendance, assessment of site audience behavior and search engine optimization.
In this book, Ben Hunt, considered one of the most influential experts in improving usability and website conversion, offers simple and effective solutions for optimizing Internet projects and taking them to a whole new level of return. The publication consists of two parts. In the first part, the author offers accessible methods (including the basics of usability and search engine optimization) that will help significantly increase site traffic. The second part of the book is devoted to professional techniques that will keep the attention of visitors and turn them into customers or regular users. The publication contains hundreds of tips and tricks, as well as several detailed cases for optimizing individual web pages. Having mastered the material of this book, you will know how to get the most out of your online projects,
About the author of the book
Ben Hunt has been in web design since 1994. In the late 1990s, he was the art director of Freeserve, the first mass service provider to provide free Internet access. He has worked for Poulter Partners, a trademark consulting company, and for Dubit, a youth marketing company. As a leading consultant to Scratchmedia, a UK-based web design consultancy, Ben has supported corporations, government agencies, and civil society organizations around the world to help them make great strides by improving design and usability. In his blog on webdesignfromscrath.com, he advises and educates everyone on how to create a simple and effective website design. His articles are known to millions of users, and the author himself is considered one of the most influential figures in the field of enhancing usability. In 2007, Ben talked about his philosophy and design methods in the book “Save the Pixel - The Art of Simple Web Design”.
Detailed content of the book with copyright comments
Part I. Design and traffic
The structure of your website is the most important factor in attracting visitors. The first part of the book shows the errors of most sites and offers a new approach to creating sites that is guaranteed to increase traffic.
Chapter 1. How to make a website successful , which describes typical mistakes of the usual approach to web design and explains why this approach is doomed to poor results. This chapter introduces a new model for creating sites, aimed primarily at potential customers.
Chapter 2. The basics of search engine optimization , which shows how search engines work and what needs to be done so that more people see your site.
Chapter 3. Expanding Coverage, which explains how to change your point of view on the point of view of the client, how to expand the boundaries and enhance the impact of site design.
Chapter 4. Using the recognition ladder , which provides a simple but extremely powerful tool for visualizing your customers, contacting groups of potential customers that you have never contacted before, and how to meet their expectations.
Chapter 5. Work on the recognition ladder , which shows eight real concrete examples, and helps to apply the recognition ladder model in any marketing task.
Part II Design and Conversion
Encouraging people to visit your site is good, but do you need simple visitors or viewers? To find out what makes people choose the answer “yes”, I spent two years devoted to tests and research. Part II will help turn potential customers into real ones by offering techniques, including a simple three-step structure.
Chapter 6. Make the site sell , which shows how to use the funnel transitions to simulate the site to notice where the loss of visitors occurs and what to do if you find “leaks”.
Chapter 7. Attract Attention, which offers a set of techniques for creating web pages that attract the attention of visitors and convince them that it is on this site that they will find what they are looking for. This chapter addresses the basic techniques of graphic design, such as layout, accessibility and presentation, as well as provides the necessary advice for creating effective text.
Chapter 8. Maintain an interest in which you learn the techniques that keep visitors and encourages them to interact with the site. You will find answers to questions about why positive signs are needed, and how to build a trusting relationship and eliminate doubts, how to detect and exclude the reasons why visitors leave the site. This chapter also describes how to create web pages that work with people of different psychological types.
Chapter 9. Call for action , which highlights the critical difference between an entertainment website and a sales website. Most sites simply can not cope with how to timely and correctly ask people to do something. And it is not surprising that only a small group of visitors moves on to action. Effective calls to action must be worked out. In this chapter, you will find six tips for creating effective calls to action. She explains how to create momentum leading to each call to action, how to get visitors to move from one page to another, and how to get them through a key final mark. Tips are backed up by examples of using texts and graphics for maximum effect.
Chapter 10. Website Strategy, which provides step-by-step instructions to help you use the techniques in this book. Whether you are creating a new site or working on an existing one, this chapter will help you start moving towards success.
Chapter 11. Web page optimization , which demonstrates how to test the attractiveness of a website using Website Optimizer, a popular free tool from Google. I offer you a set of practical solutions to which we have arrived in a difficult way and which we have obtained in the course of more than 70 experiments over the past year.
Book Review by Drayton Bird Associates
Currently, almost every “sane” business organization has its own website. Having a website is a deliberate necessity, since almost every person conducts their own marketing research on the Internet before spending money. Unfortunately, most websites are simply not able to fulfill the task assigned to them - to serve as a source of convenient information, influence or convince as many people as possible.
But even if your site is a happy exception, it will be of little use, if almost no one visits it. Attendance, or rather, its absence - this is the main trouble of the vast majority of sites. As my former boss David Ogilvy once remarked: "It is impossible to save souls in an empty church." This book will help you solve the "site" problems, and it has several advantages:
- Firstly, it is written in simple language, unlike other books on similar topics, which, it seems to me, are designed to demonstrate the intellect of the author, and not to provide real help to the reader.
- Secondly, it introduces you step by step with everything that you need to know to attract visitors to your site, conclude more transactions, and all this at a lower cost.
- Thirdly, this book is full of practical examples, which will greatly facilitate the understanding of the author’s intention.
Review by Ken McCarthy, Founder of The System Seminar, organizer of the very first Internet Marketing Conference
Not much time has passed since people who were convinced that the Internet could become a “real” means of transmitting information could fit in at one table. I say this without any exaggeration, because I was one of them. You can’t even imagine how difficult it was in the early 1990s to interest Silicon Valley specialists and representatives of “interactive digital media” in the commercial potential of the Internet.
And as we can see, to date, the contribution and influence of the Internet has far surpassed the wildest assumptions of those years. But there are still a lot of problems.
Unlike print, radio, television or any other way of transmitting information, the Internet is a “transparent” media, that is, the creators and ideological inspirers of sites can really see how their designs affect users. Surprisingly, very few web designers use this simple but very significant fact.
The main reason for this “inattention” is that no one showed them how to track and verify the various approaches, and did not explain why.
Having started writing this book, Ben Hunt set about solving a problem that only a few professionals in the field can do. He managed, abandoning his ideas about web design formed over the years of successful work, to look at the problem through the eyes of a beginner.
This book is before you, the result of his work, and I can safely say that it is as fascinating as everything that I have seen since Mark Andreessen added a tag for inserting images into HTML. The fashion for Internet design comes and goes, and this book will become a solid foundation on which you can build your future.
- Excerpt from the book on the publisher’s website (Chapter 9, “Call for Action,” PDF)
- Book on piter.com
- Book on ozon.ru