How to make the most of your website
Head on over to the Webfooted Designs blog for the first part of our Top 10 tips for making the most of your website article. Second part coming soon!
Web Design for ROI: Turning Browsers into Buyers and Prospects into Leads
Before I carry on I’ll just explain what ROI means (I’m sure you already know, but it doesn’t hurt to have a reminder). ROI stands for Return on Investment, which (quoting Wikipedia) is “the ratio of money gained or lost on an investment relative to the amount of money invested”. So this book is about making your website as effective as possible so that you make the best return on your investment in it. To use some more jargon, it’s all about improving your conversion rate – i.e. increasing the number of visitors to your site which take a desired action, whether that is buying something from your online shop, signing up for a newsletter or making an enquiry about your services.
This is a book that I’m going to come back to again and again. I’ve already picked up a lot from it and I’m sure that I’ll learn a bit more each time I read it. Can you tell that I enjoyed it? Seriously, it’s making me think very carefully about what makes a persuasive and successful website.
The book has a very informative and persuasive introduction to what ROI is all about in the context of a website, and the benefits of improving your site’s conversion rate over throwing more money at advertising. It then has a chapter for each of the important sections of a site:
- Landing Pages
- Home Pages
- Category Pages
- Detail Pages
- Forms
- Checkout Process
Finally, there is a chapter giving further resources (books and websites) for those who want to read more.
I thought this was an excellent book – I found the writing style very easy to get on with and feel inspired to put some of the concepts into practice.
Rating: 
Buy “Web Design for ROI” from Amazon >
Time for a beer
Blimey, I’ve had a bit of a day of it. Seemed to be one thing after another. The main event of the day was launching a website we’ve been working on for a few months. Bit of a complicated one so had to take it a step at a time. Every time I thought I’d got it sorted something else would come up. And this has been going on since 8 o’clock this morning to now. The final problem threw me into a bit of a panic – was something I’d never come across before. Thankfully I found a solution fairly quickly. A few more grey hairs but apart from that everything is ok I think (touch wood).
I definitely deserve a beer after all that!
New-look for Webfooted Designs
I didn’t have a chance to post last night as we were having a big push to launch the new-look website for our web design company. We’re really pleased with our sparkly new site. This is phase one of our revamp – we have lots of exciting new things to add in the coming weeks.
This redesign has been a long time coming for us. As web designers we need to have a top-notch website, but it’s always the last one to get updated. Isn’t that always the way? It’s partly because we always give priority to our clients’ sites, but also because we can find it very painful to work on our own stuff. I think it’s because we’re too close to it so we’re always really critical of everything we do – we’re our own worst clients. In fact this time round we chose to get a graphic designer friend of ours to design the logo for us and we think he did a fantastic job. It really gave a kick-start to the design process.
