Book Summary: Call to Action

I've been working at rebuilding a website that's become a much longer term project than I'd anticipated. It's been because of distractions, putting out fires, but I think mostly procrastination. Part of it was because I started reading this book called "Call to Action" (Amazon.com) and came to realize all the mistakes I'd made so far in working at the site having already paid a contractor for some time now racking up a whole lot of unnecessary costs in the process.

I figured I should first complete the book, summarize it before I continued working at the site. Well, fast forward more than 10 months later, the summary's finally (mostly) done. It's a bit cathartic - or at least it's similar to the feeling you get after a long period of constipation. The book's not an easy read if you want to integrate and connect the ideas that they provide. It's a bit disorganized and it repeats itself - but when it repeats itself it also introduces a few new but frustratingly useful variations (if they weren't useful, I wouldn't have to go through the task of slowly combing through the book for the loose ideas).

So here's the summary (Scribd). It's longer than I'd like at 13 pages but I did find the book brilliant - and it hit all the right sweet spots. The most important thing about a website isn't about how pretty it looks but how well it turns users into customers (or persuading them do what you want) and this book provides a structured approach to doing it.