Making Websites Win Quotes

“Separation of concerns is a fancy name for when information is organized and encapsulated into modules. The concept is closely related to the phrase “a place for everything and everything in its place.” Separation of concerns is essential when you’re managing a lot of content. For website design, the modules can be paragraphs, page sections, pages, or groups of pages: You can encapsulate benefits into clearly labeled paragraphs. Many winning websites clearly encapsulate their content into separate page sections. The navigation bars of many websites clearly encapsulate the content into groups of pages. (In one of our case studies, we describe how we used this technique to increase paid memberships for Smart Insights by 75%.) By modularizing, you allow your visitors to easily find the information that they need, and to ignore the rest. It’s hard to stress how important it is to organize information into an architecture that’s easy to navigate. Once a visitor is lost, it’s difficult to show them counterobjections. They’ll never find them.”
― Karl Blanks, Making Websites Win: Apply the Customer-Centric Methodology That Has Doubled the Sales of Many Leading Websites

“When we ask a website’s visitors why they didn’t buy, we hear them say the same things over and over again. Lack of trust comes up a lot, as does lack of understanding and inability to find a suitable product.”
― Karl Blanks, Making Websites Win: Apply the Customer-Centric Methodology That Has Doubled the Sales of Many Leading Websites

“The website’s Hazelnut Trail is so effective you don’t even feel like you’re dealing with a company. By the time that you sign up for a financial product, you probably won’t even feel like you have been sold to. The fact that the company gets paid at the end seems almost incidental.”
― Karl Blanks, Making Websites Win: Apply the Customer-Centric Methodology That Has Doubled the Sales of Many Leading Websites

“What we can learn from bricks-and-mortar bookstores About twenty-five years ago, offline bookstores learned not to push the hard sale. They discovered they could convert a visitor from “just browsing” to “buying” by making their stores highly conducive to reading. They added chairs, reading areas, and even in-store coffee stores. They discovered that the more time visitors spent in the store, the more likely they were to buy. Amazon has adopted the same approach, allowing visitors to “look inside” books.”
― Karl Blanks, Making Websites Win: Apply the Customer-Centric Methodology That Has Doubled the Sales of Many Leading Websites

“Winning websites…are like water chutes: if your website doesn’t appeal to both early- and late-stage buyers, here’s how to design unbeatable multistep funnels It’s easy to forget that some visitors aren’t ready to buy You hear marketers say that they “want to make visitors reach for their credit cards.” But pushy selling is usually thrashed by sophisticated relationship building.”
― Karl Blanks, Making Websites Win: Apply the Customer-Centric Methodology That Has Doubled the Sales of Many Leading Websites

“If you have economies of scale, penetration pricing often works best Would your business benefit from economies of scale? (Most web businesses do.) If so, your ideal pricing strategy may be penetration pricing—charging a low price, basing your financial model on eventually reaching market-dominating economies of scale. Supply-side economies of scale mean that your profit margins increase the more you sell, because as you sell more, your cost of sales (unit costs) usually becomes lower, and your fixed costs become a smaller fraction of your overall costs. Demand-side economies of scale mean that the more customers you get, the more value each customer gets from your service, for the following reasons. You may benefit from having a network of customers. For example, if a phone system had only two users, only one type of call could be made (one between User A and User B). If it had three users, then three types of call could be made (A–B, B–C and A-C). If it had twelve users, sixty-six different types of calls could be made. The overall value of a phone system to its users is roughly proportional to the square of the number of users. You may benefit from there being a market of complementary products and services. The project-management web app Basecamp has many integrations, which it promotes on its website. At the bottom of the page, Basecamp shows off how quickly it’s acquiring new users, to persuade other companies to add integrations. You may benefit from having a bigger knowledge base, more forums, or more trained users. The ecosystem of knowledge around a product can be valuable in itself. WordPress grows because it’s easy to find a WordPress developer and it’s easy for those developers to find answers to their questions. You may benefit from the perception that yours is the standard. Users are aware of the value of choosing the ultimate winner—especially when they have to invest time and resources into using your company—so they will be attracted by the perception that you’ll win.”
― Karl Blanks, Making Websites Win: Apply the Customer-Centric Methodology That Has Doubled the Sales of Many Leading Websites

“Regardless of how your designs were created, InVision and Marvel allow you to easily turn them into functional prototype websites. With InVision, you upload your page designs, and then link them together to make the website navigable. Then, you can carry out user tests on what, to the users, appears to be a real website, even though it hasn’t seen a smidgen of code. InVision also allows other people to give written feedback on your work-in-progress designs. You upload your designs, and then invite others to annotate them with whatever type of feedback you desire. Notable has similar functionality. Alternatives include Firefly and BugHerd. The Composite app connects to Photoshop files, turning them into clickable prototypes. To gather feedback on your work-in-progress videos, you can use Frame.io, a fantastic web-based platform. Alternatives include Wipster, Symu, Vidhub, and Kollaborate. Such services provide great benefits; it’s hard to gather and record such feedback even when everyone’s in the same room. Optimal Workshop provides several tools (OptimalSort, Treejack, and Chalkmark) to help you optimize your website’s navigation and information architecture. The tools are described in our article about card sorting. Alternatives for card sorting include SimpleCardSort, UsabiliTEST, and Xsort.”
― Karl Blanks, Making Websites Win: Apply the Customer-Centric Methodology That Has Doubled the Sales of Many Leading Websites

“Wireframes help you to focus on what matters: the words. To illustrate this, take one of your pages, select all the text, and paste it into a plain text editor. You may be surprised at what you see. (For many websites, this exercise is much more useful than it may sound.) Some pages are so beautifully designed, it’s easy to overlook the words. But the words are what win A/B tests.”
― Karl Blanks, Making Websites Win: Apply the Customer-Centric Methodology That Has Doubled the Sales of Many Leading Websites

“Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug is an excellent introduction to web usability. We passionately believe it should be on the school curriculum. Designed for Use by Lukas Mathis is less entertaining than Don’t Make Me Think, but it covers more usability concepts. If this book list seems worryingly short, that’s a testament to how much ground this book covers. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward R. Tufte contains many examples of complex data shown in beautifully elegant ways. Don’t be put off by its technical-sounding title. It’s fun to read.”
― Karl Blanks, Making Websites Win: Apply the Customer-Centric Methodology That Has Doubled the Sales of Many Leading Websites

“Why are so many designers “usability blind”? If you’re a sadist with a technical bent, you will enjoy running usability tests. During tests, we see users caught in wild-goose chases, scratching their heads, and sometimes swearing or even hitting their keyboards. Why do marketers make websites that cause people to punch peripherals? Because marketers are afflicted with the curse of knowledge, a cognitive bias that makes it extremely difficult to think about a problem from the perspective of someone who’s less informed. Marketers spend so long looking at their own websites, they can’t imagine what it would be like to see the website for the first time. As a result, the website’s users appear to be stupid. It’s a compelling illusion. But look at it another way: Our users desired something. We created a website to satisfy that desire. And our users still can’t get what they desire. Now who’s stupid? How can you overcome the curse of knowledge? Design your processes for what you perceive to be a busy, lazy, drunk, amnesiac idiot—what lawyers call a “moron in a hurry” (really). Even geniuses with time on their hands will be grateful that you did.”
― Karl Blanks, Making Websites Win: Apply the Customer-Centric Methodology That Has Doubled the Sales of Many Leading Websites

“Keys to Great Writing by Stephen Wilbers. This is our favorite book on the list. It teaches you the mechanics of writing well. It’s brilliantly concise and is full of techniques that actually work. You have probably never heard of most of them. You may enjoy this book even if you hated English classes at school. We suspect that it particularly appeals to programmers, because it provides a much-needed logical framework for writing. The book summarizes several other books, including two other favorites of ours: Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace and The Sense of Structure: Writing from the Reader’s Perspective”
― Karl Blanks, Making Websites Win: Apply the Customer-Centric Methodology That Has Doubled the Sales of Many Leading Websites

“It’s hard to write clearly. In fact, it’s hard to find someone who can teach you how to write clearly. Schools tend to spend more time teaching pupils how to sound smart, or how to analyze Shakespearian prose, than how to be understood. Students are more likely to be told to memorize poetry than to carry out a readability test. This is a disservice. Poetry can be life-enriching, but the purpose of almost all writing is to communicate information.”
― Karl Blanks, Making Websites Win: Apply the Customer-Centric Methodology That Has Doubled the Sales of Many Leading Websites

“Tools for tracking what people are saying about you The following tools can be useful for tracking mentions: Moz Fresh Web Explorer, Google Alerts, Talkwalker Alerts, Mention, Ninja Outreach, Twitter Search, BuzzSumo, and Facebook. Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides powerful tools for real-time analysis and monitoring of social media.”
― Karl Blanks, Making Websites Win: Apply the Customer-Centric Methodology That Has Doubled the Sales of Many Leading Websites

“Tools for exit surveys iPerceptions provides a ready-made way of implementing exit surveys. You can also create them using Usabilla, Informizely, Qualaroo, Hotjar, Medallia Digital, and ForeSee.”
― Karl Blanks, Making Websites Win: Apply the Customer-Centric Methodology That Has Doubled the Sales of Many Leading Websites

“Tools for surveying We often use whichever survey tools our clients use. Popular options include SurveyMonkey, Google Forms (which has few features, but is agile), Survey Gizmo, Medallia Digital, Survey Anyplace (specifically for mobile), Wufoo, Clicktools, Polldaddy, Typeform, and Uservoice”
― Karl Blanks, Making Websites Win: Apply the Customer-Centric Methodology That Has Doubled the Sales of Many Leading Websites

“Tools for live chat Popular tools for live chat include Zendesk Chat, LiveChat, Drift, Freshdesk, Olark, LivePerson, HappyFox, SnapEngage, LiveAgent, Chatra, Intercom, tawk.to, Tidio, and Comm100. Some of them, like Intercom, allow you to track, help, and convert visitors across multiple browsing sessions.”
― Karl Blanks, Making Websites Win: Apply the Customer-Centric Methodology That Has Doubled the Sales of Many Leading Websites

“Tools for form analytics Options for form analytics include Clicktale, Hotjar, Formisimo, Decibel Insight, SessionCam, and Inspectlet.”
― Karl Blanks, Making Websites Win: Apply the Customer-Centric Methodology That Has Doubled the Sales of Many Leading Websites

“Tools for click-mapping We often use Crazy Egg, Hotjar, and Clicktale, and several A/B testing tools that include similar functionality. Alternatives include Fullstory, Inspectlet, Decibel Insight, Jaco, Lucky Orange, MouseStats, Ptengine, and userTrack.”
― Karl Blanks, Making Websites Win: Apply the Customer-Centric Methodology That Has Doubled the Sales of Many Leading Websites

“Speak to salespeople (what we call “VOC Aggregators”)—people who have sold face-to-face the same type of product—or similar products.”
― Karl Blanks, Making Websites Win: Apply the Customer-Centric Methodology That Has Doubled the Sales of Many Leading Websites

“Being able to figure out quickly what works and what doesn’t can mean the difference between survival and extinction.” —Hal Varian, Google Chief Economist “If you double the number of experiments you do per year you’re going to double your inventiveness.” —Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon”
― Karl Blanks, Making Websites Win: Apply the Customer-Centric Methodology That Has Doubled the Sales of Many Leading Websites

“If coding is an obstacle for you, you can get great results using this book’s methodology with a website builder tool like SquareSpace, Wix, Shopify, BigCommerce (a former client of ours), WebFlow, LeadPages, Unbounce, ClickFunnels, or PageWiz. Then, imagine how easy it is to get visitors once you have created a website that people love and that has a huge lifetime customer value. Advertising becomes simple when you can afford to outbid all the competition. SEO is a piece of cake when you have a website that people want to link to.”
― Karl Blanks, Making Websites Win: Apply the Customer-Centric Methodology That Has Doubled the Sales of Many Leading Websites

“Please get in touch We love feedback! We plan to update the book often—particularly the eBook version. So please let us know if you notice anything you think is inaccurate, wrong, or missing. Just email us at feedback@conversion-rate-experts.com. If we incorporate your changes, we’ll add you to the list of supporters at the end of the book. Also, if you’d like to spread the word, the authors are available for interviews, opinion pieces, and odd jobs around the home. Just email oddjobs@conversion-rate-experts.com.”
― Karl Blanks, Making Websites Win: Apply the Customer-Centric Methodology That Has Doubled the Sales of Many Leading Websites

“The tools we’d recommend you look at first are Sketch, Figma, Balsamiq Mockups, Framer X, and UXPin. However, there are a crazy number of good alternatives, including…taking a very deep breath…Adobe Brackets, AppCooker (for iOS apps), Appery.io (outputs code for mobile and responsive apps), Atomic.io, Axure (a complex, sophisticated wireframe tool suite), Balsamiq Mockups, Canva, Craft, Creately, draw.io, Fireworks, FlairBuilder (for apps), Flinto and Flinto Lite, Fluid (”
― Karl Blanks, Making Websites Win: Apply the Customer-Centric Methodology That Has Doubled the Sales of Many Leading Websites