I recently finished reading the book Landing Page Optimization by Tim Ash. The book is very complete and provides great examples to help readers understand metrics, user behaviors, usability basics, marketing ROI, optimization methods, tools, roles and the AIDA (awareness, interest, desire, action) decision process. Although the author sometimes puts down other methodologies, there is a lot to be learned from his company’s insights and experiences. Our approach to landing page optimization will definitely benefit from the information, tools and systems described in the book.

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Why start from scratch? With the millions of Websites available, chances are that someone already found a solution to the problem you’re working on. Why not take advantage of this?

A good designer tries to understand what works and what doesn’t. Design pattern libraries get exactly at that by providing examples and rationales for solutions to common design problems.

You don’t have to repeat a pattern. If you understand what’s good about it, you can make it evolve.

The following design pattern libraries will help you find inspiration:

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When building Websites, we find it useful to have a list of elements to consider to help us ensure we’re not forgetting anything. Over the years, we’ve used several online tools and resources to perform automated tests, improve the design, perform SEO, etc. The following is a list of some of the best resources we came across:

Accessibility

We use FAE and EvalAccess to perform automated accessibility compliance evaluations. It’s always a good start.

• EvalAccess
• Functional Accessibility Evaluator

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Browsershots.org is a very interesting and practical tool to test and fix browser compatibility issues. Designers will appreciate its simplicity and extensive testing parameters (screen resolution, color depth, javascript and Flash versions, etc).

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