As the title promises, this book gives lots of practical and actionable advice. The first chapter introduces a little theory. There is a short summary of the adoption bell curve made popular by the book “Crossing the Chasm.” There is also a brief anatomy of what happens when things go wrong in terms of office politics.

This book appropriately focuses on what is called in the business “goal conversion” which is converting less desirable user behavior (e.g. casual surfing) into more desirable behavior (e.g. registering, purchasing).

There is a chapter on the two main investment strategies and their potential resulting returns. Basically, you either decide to spend money on advertising and marketing to get more traffic to your site or you decide to spend money on improving the design of the web site which should improve your conversion rate. Obviously, your best bet is a prudent combination of the two.

The rest of the book articulately presents good design advice for the various parts of a typical web site. The advice is always focused on improving your conversion rate and not on what looks cool.