The Design of Sites: Patterns, Principles, and Processes for Crafting a Customer-Centered Web Experience

-- Improve your Web site step-by-step - and boost customer satisfaction and retention.-- Patterns for e-commerce, internationalization, site-branding, education, and more.

-- Optimize home pages, layout, navigation, usability, and performance.

Based upon extensive, ground-breaking research, The Design of Sites introduces a comprehensive, pattern-based approach to making web sites truly customer-centered. Using the 101 patterns presented here, Web and business professionals can learn from the industry's experience and best practices, and dramatically improve customer satisfaction and retention. The authors have chronicled visitors' behavior to find the patterns that emerge from experiences ranging from navigation to e-shopping, and to discover how individual site visits fit into users' larger goals of finding information and making purchasing decisions. Drawing on this research, The Design of Sites introduces proven principles, processes, and patterns for building customer-centered Web sites. Their patterns encompass virtually every key issue, including: creating powerful home pages; managing content; simplifying layouts and navigation; optimizing performance, and much more. For all Web designers, developers and decision-makers seeking to maximize the business value of their Web sites.

Douglas K. van Duyne is cofounder, president, and CEO of NetRaker Corporation, a maker of mission-critical Web site design and usability testing tools. He has been an innovator in online shopping, e-commerce, and multimedia development for such companies as Intel, Safeway, and Cooking.

James A. Landay is a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he teaches courses in human-computer interaction. He is also the CTO and cofounder of NetRaker.

Jason I. Hong is a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. He has worked at IBM Research, Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Laboratories, and Xerox Research, and is a consultant for eDealFinder.

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