Web Design for ROI is an excellent book for reviewing all those website elements that help convince the user to click on the call to action button. As I read the book I’m creating my own checklist of website elements that should be considered for every website. Below is my list, I reccoment reading the book for better a more indepth understanding.

Web Design for ROI

Define the Big Picture
Are the following questions answered:
▪ Define the website owner’s objectives?
▪ Define the website audiences?
▪ Who is the competition?
▪ What are the expected traffic sources?

Measure Success, (know what’s working)
▪ Setup stats tool
▪ Define the call to action
▪ Connect call to action to stats tool

Landing Page Design Guidelines
(choose the guidelines that apply to your particular website)
▪ Establish credibility
▪ Use industry-aplpropriate design
▪ Display excellent references
⁃ awards
⁃ newspaper and magazine quotes
⁃ certifications
⁃ testimonials
▪ Minimal Navigation
▪ Make page appearance consistent with next landing page when using an affiliate link
▪ Make sure offer is consistent, match the wording
▪ Offer segmenting options for different products
▪ Eliminate nonessential graphics
▪ Accommodate different reading patterns (titles, paragraphs, bulleted lists)
▪ Place the call to action in each type of reading pattern
▪ Make buttons look like buttons
▪ Button text should be specific and motivating

Trends and future trends

• Communication between countries – Global corporation and partnerships are growing and language barriers are a common problem that need to be solved.
• Online Reputation Management
• More video
• Social Media Optimization
• Cross channel delivery methods / widgets
• Implementation of Happiness from a scientific approach - In the last ten years, psychology has started to deliver hard facts about what causes human happiness. This new research is expected to be implemented into web experience design.

Tips

Get your website more findable and more traffic

• Google Sitemap files are currently read by Yahoo and Ask.com spiders. Great for SEO.
  
• Have you web content pushed to aggregates who have appropriate readers
• SEO
• SEM
• Paid Search
• Use of social networks
• Find blogglers in your subject
• Paid blogging

Progressive Enhancement – When your website content looks good through all layers of display. Example: HTML > CSS > Flash.

“Always have empty space in your Schedule”

Tips for Revenue Site

• User Targeting – Know who your users are and who you are going after (Geography, Age, Sex, Interests)
• Make effort to engage with you advertisers
• The more you know about you website’s audience, the more of an intelligent conversation you can have with you advertisers
• Many of the pros use Crazy Egg for its heatmaps - http://crazyegg.com/
• Always disclose on site if you use affiliate links
• Know your conversion rates
  • How many visitors/how many clicked
  • how many clicked/how many bought
• Use MyBlogLog to see good insight on your blog readers
• Link Bate – Funny, News, Resource or Controversial
• Paid links

SEO Tips

• Deep links are very important
• Effective SEO has only one thing/topic/keyphrase per page
• Google Webmaster Central – Be familiar with everything here
• Know your internal link structure by using Google Webmaster Tools – Links
• See Yahoo’s Cached pages and Inbound link info with Yahoo Site Explorer
• Use a Sitemap file. Understand the protocol by reading www.sitemaps.org
• Use robots.txt file to point to sitemap files
• Use Hit Tail to quickly find “long tail” search terms

Emotional Design

• First impressions matter
• Establish trust
• Show commitment
• Forgiveness
• Respect your users, they are smart
• Error feedback “Thanks for being a beta tester. We are working some bugs out.”
• When asking for a testimonial phrase it like: “Do you kick ass by using my service, tell me how”

Miscellaneous
Web PR Companies - http://www.marketwire.com/
Bulk Slide Scanning - http://www.jaincotech.com/
Bulk upload with keyword tagging from Adobe Light room with the iStockphoto plug-in
Create Surveys quick and easy - http://www.surveymonkey.com
USB stick with location tracking by GPS and plots it’s path on Google Earth (007 shit) http://www.trackstick.com/
Fulfillment House - http://www.theconnextion.com/
CSS Framework - Blueprint
Send pictures, audio & text straight to you blog with Utterz
Add voice to your website with Jaduka

Books

• Web Design for ROI
• How to Win Sales & Influence Spiders
• Presentation Zen – one of the more popular books at this year’s conference (how to write a presentation)
• Vagabonding by Rolf Potts - “Vagabonding” is about taking time off from your normal life — from six weeks, to two years — to discover and experience the world on your own terms.

Miscellaneous

Everyone things this site is hilarious:
http://icanhascheezburger.com/