Making Your Website Work: 100 Copy & Design Tweaks for Smart Business Owners
Take a shortcut to making your website work
Want to learn how to drive more business through your website without taking an expensive course or reading a pile of books?
"Making Your Website Work" helps you understand what makes a great website through practical tips you can apply to your website today to get more clients and sales.
It doesn’t teach you all the copywriting formulas, make you learn design rules by heart or generally talk a lot about things in theory.
Instead, it describes real website problems that freelancers, digital agencies, ecommerce shops and SaaS companies face – the same problems you have with your website – and shows you how to fix them through practical tips.
Among other things, you’ll learn:
- How to spot (and fix) vague and self-centered copy
- How to sound trustworthy even without testimonials
- How to structure your homepage to make your message clear
- Why you should delete your Testimonials and FAQ pages
- Where to place call-to-action buttons to get more people to click
- What design mistakes get in the way of your message
Who is this book for?
This book is for you if you're:
- A business owner who takes care of their website themselves. You’ll learn how to write better copy and how to make sure that your design doesn’t kill your message.
- A copywriter who wants to sharpen their skill and also learn how to prevent designers from murdering their copy later on. You’ll learn to spot bad design decisions and discover powerful arguments to use in conversations with your clients and their designers.
- A web designer who wants to design not only pretty websites but also websites that convert.
- A business owner who is planning to hire someone to create their website for them. You’ll learn how to spot ineffective copy and sloppy design to make sure that the pretty website you’re paying for will also convert.
Reviews (59)
Follow this book’s ideas to develop websites that truly work.
I bought the printed book. It’s very very useful. Small gems of ideas that will help web developers who are more technical and need to become more conversion/UX oriented like myself. I’m glad she took the time to put it all together in one easy way to refer to. I followed a few ideas in the book to develop a website project and was able to improve on bounce rates for the website overall by using one CTA per page (leading the user from page to page on a path), improving navigation, eliminating dropdown menu, etc. Thanks the author for the initiative. My husband is a book author too I know how much work it is to get ideas on paper. All the best to you. Adriana Thieme
You need this book!
If you have a small online business, you need this book! Since venturing to launch my own e-commerce website, I've read many books that claim to have "secrets" to make a site rank and convert. Most of them are full of fluff, want to sell you online courses to reveal "the real insights" or assume that you have different I.T, marketing departments, and web developers to help you implement changes (along with a large budget) This book stands alone in that it gives you concise, actionable steps that you can take as a self-employed, small business owner who is trying to fill all the roles. Optimizing a website for conversion takes a lot of work. And a lot of self-employed website owners see the process as an insurmountable task. The author recognizes this and breaks down the most common mistakes people make into micro chapters and gives detailed steps on how to fix or avoid these pitfalls. Implementing these changes will take some time. But now I have a clear roadmap to follow.
Restructuring my Site Based on The Advice Found in This Book!
This book is full of sound, actionable advice. My site had been getting very little conversions (emails through my site) until I started talking more about the benefits of working for me, instead of just about me and my services. After I made that change, I got three emails from creditable, prospective customers. Now I've decided to go through my entire site and restructure it based on the rest of her advice. I'm also using Gill's advice for all my clients' websites and have decided to purchase the book for each new customer to use when creating their content. It's one of the most valuable, useful books I have ever purchased and I'd love to see more books written by her.
Easy to digest actionable advice
There is no other book available like this one, at least to my knowledge and I read a lot. It actually teaches you how to write web copy. NOT sales pages and direct sales tactics repackaged for the web. Don't get me wrong; new copywriters need to learn from direct mail. It has its place. But it can be hard to bridge the gap between the smarmy direct sales pages and the sleek web copy found on sites like Apple or Hubspot or Basecamp. And this book teaches you how! I will say there were some minor issues. For instance, there was a page where two examples seem to have been mixed up in the editing process and they were each placed under the wrong explainer. But really that's just a nitpicking thing. Its full of actionable advice so you can make improvements right away. And it's a quick read. I read the whole thing in just a few hours. Despite the quick read time, I have tons of notes and highlights. I got a LOT out of this book.
Easily Digestible Quick Tips
It was a no-brainer for me to buy Gill's book, having followed her posts and read her email messages for some time. Not only does she present great tips in her book, but I especially like that I don't have to wade through verbose chapters in an effort to find something I.can.use.right.now. One can jump around to whatever topic is of immediate interest, each tip being very concisely presented. All of this at a right price point, too.
A must for any business making their own website
This book was so valuable to me as a copywriter! While I knew most of the copywriting tips, it was useful to have all of them focused in one book, and I loved the addition of the design and strategy tips too. If you’re not hiring a professional to design and write your site, I highly recommend you get this book. Each tip is just one or two pages, and there are loads of concrete examples so you can figure out how to apply them to your business.
Wonderful read
I just finished reading Gill's book and I must say it was wonderful. It's packed with useful advice and tips to make your website more customer-oriented. Really makes you go and check your own website and see if you applied already any of the advice in the book. It's a really helpful read for freelancers managing their own website.
Immensely Practical Guide
I love this book! I bought it a few days ago because I'm working on my website and want it to be as effective as possible. Gill Andrews has done a superb job in giving 100 actionable shortcut steps to take that are geared for business owners. Best of all, I didn't feel overwhelmed by the info because she organizes it neatly into bite-sized chunks for those of us who aren't skilled in copywriting and design. I've already spread the word about this book to some other small business owners I know who are struggling with their web content and layout.
Best Book for Real Advice
I work in SEO for 20 years. I think I buy all the website advice published because you never know where you'll find a great tidbit of information. That said... this book is now my standard go to book. I love using the 100 design tweaks as a guide when I start working on a new site.
Incredibly valuable and useful information!
As I'm building out my new website, I was looking for tips to help conversions. I found the perfect advice in this book, it's full of very useful and proven tips. It's a quick read and I found myself highlighting frequently as I went through it, noting what I needed to think about in my own copy and design. If you're looking to create or update your site, look no further, this book will make it very easy for you.
Comments
Post a Comment