Website Strategy Learning Hub

The following books cover questions such as: Is your website easy to navigate? Is it fast to load? Are sentences worded appropriately for your target audience? Do you have a search bar? Could I explain the contents of a paragraph with bullet points?

• Don’t Make Me Think – Steve Krug
• Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content That Works – Ganice Redish
• Forms That Work: Designing Web Forms for Usability – Caroline Jarrett & Gerry Gaffney

Conducting usability testing – watch people use a website and carry out common tasks, and identify any problems that the users experience.

• Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do It Yourself Guide to Finding & Fixing Usability Problems – Steve Krug

• Measuring The User Experience: Collecting, Analysing and Presenting Usability Metrics – Tom Tullis & Bill Albert

An in depth guide to building persona models. These models are designed to better understand who’s using your website, and how to optimise their experience.

• About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design – Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin (chapters 1-7)

• Why Product Designers (UX/UI) should be using a 8pt grid system | Tutorial and Template
• Learn CSS Grid The Easy Way

• Shopify SEO: How to find, attract, and convert buyers from Google Search – LOGEIX

We use the following tools to build our WordPress websites.

Get WordPress up and running on your computer using this:

• WPLocal 

The theme that we use:

• Hello Theme – we use this because it’s lightweight.
• Download the Hello Child Theme here 

The main plugins that we use:

• Elementor Plugin – simple page builder which any business owner can learn to use.
• Elementor Header & Footer Builder 
• WP Fastest Cache

   Guides:

• Optimising images with Elementor
• Removing page titles with Hello Theme
• Elementor Layout optimisation best practices
• Settings up global styling with Elementor

Understanding why customers make purchases is important. This is not an easy task though. Online businesses use a range of psychological tactics to sell more of their products.

• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion – Robert B Cialdini

This relates to the choice of font(s) and how the text is formatted for easy readability. 

• The Elements of Typographic Style – Robert Bringhurst
• Typography Tutorial – 10 rules to help you rule type

• The ultimate guide to SEO | Ethan Smith (Graphite)

It’s important to be able to understand the role that a website plays in a business’ marketing strategy. Let’s say for example that you have a web store that sells smart shoes. Your brand is not well established. Website visitors may want to understand what is special about the shoes before they make a purchase. You could create blog post to describe what is unique about your smart shoes by comparing them to others from well known brands. Feeling more educated after reading the blog post, they may buy them.

• This is Marketing: you can’t be seen until you learn to see – Seth Godin
• The Ultimate Guide To Digital Marketing – DigitalMarketer

You can set up analytics on your website for free. Best practice is to set up Google Analytics 4 with Google Tag Manager.

• Google Analytics 4
• Google Tag Manager

Before gathering data about your website users, you’ll need to install a cookie banner and ask for their consent. Asking for consent is a requirement to comply with European GDPR laws. A cookie policy is also necessary, as it provides full transparency to your website visitors about what you intend to do with the data, and also tells them how to make complaints.

• CookieYes – provides a free cookie banner and cookie policy generator

This tool can help you identify the Google search queries that are leading to your website.

• Google Search Console

A ‘conversion’ is an objective that you want a visitor to undertake on your website. For example signing up to the mailing list. In this case, conversion rate optimisation is about how to increase the sign up rate, given the same amount of website traffic. We can test this by swapping out two versions of a web page (also known as A/B testing) and seeing which increases the sign ups. Conversion optimisation combines elements of website design, marketing, psychology and SEO, statistics and more.

• The ultimate guide to A/B testing | Ronny Kohavi (Airbnb, Microsoft, Amazon) 200K users before testing is worthwhile

• You Should Test That: conversion optimization for more leads, sales and profit or the art and science of optimized marketing – Chris Goward
• Making Websites Win: apply the customer-centric methodology that has doubled the sales of many leading websites – Dr Karl Blanks & Ben Jesson