The Critical Website Components Series, by Sean D'Souza, consists of 3 short e-books:
The About Us Page—Why You Need To Throw Away Your Brown Paper
This is an interesting view into the About Us page. Sean is clearly a big fan of personality in this page, as well as having a photo or photos here, so that customers feel more confident and are more likely to trust you. There is a lot of interesting advice here.
The Home Page—How To Put Sparkle And Pop Into Your Home
A view into how to create your home page. A couple of general layout options as well as graphic advice (the usual – create focus on what you think is important using space, contrast and direction).
Some more interesting advice on how to present your solutions on a way that will grab the attention of your potential customer. Plenty of examples.
My package also included a video with a short case study, that I didn't feel to be very useful (I have used heatmaps on my page before, and read articles on the subject, so it had nothing new for me).
Getting To Sign Up—How To Create A Clear and Simple Route For Subscribers
I thought this would be near useless (Sign ups are a whole lot less useful when you have a bunch of unconnected niche software like me, than sites like Sean's with new products that can be sold).
However, it has plenty of interesting details on not only squeeze pages, but also on creating reports – and packaging – and also on make engaging audio or video presentations.
How To Maximise The Power Of Bonuses
This was a bonus (ironically!) to the package, that covers why and how to make product bonuses, while making they seem as valuable as possible. Very interesting views and tips! I also like the view of avoiding discounting your products and using bonuses instead – there are several places where I will not buy unless there is a discount as I know they have them frequently.
Conclusion
The home page and About us books had some interesting information, but for me the Sign Up and Bonuses ebooks were the most useful. As most of Sean's e-books, all were very fun to read and quite short and to the point.
Overall, at US$49 the package value was acceptable considering the bonus e-book, but I wouldn't recommend it otherwise.
