Website Review #02: Jeffrey Magnus

Last year, I said that I will be reviewing 52 websites this year and last week, I started with Ryan Sick 's SickFitness website. If you haven't seen that review, you can check it out here. Without wasting anymore time, we will go into review for this week and we are looking at Jeffrey Magnus' website. Jeffrey is an eight time #1 Amazon best selling ghostwriter and an award winning business and memoir author. He offers a number of services for his clients such a writing, consulting and publishing. If you need any of these services, contact him and you can be confident you will get good service. So, let's dive into the review. Below is the current website.

Issues on the homepage

As you can observe, the website looks quite monotone because there is no pattern nor interrupts. There is a just a text after text. What this does is, it make the website boring to the visitors, makes it difficult to find things and they eventually leave without engaging. I understand that as an author and writer, there is a bias towards words because you are more familiar with them however, you have to understand that the website is for the visitors, not you.

Also, there is shortage of call to actions. It feels like I'm looking at a newspaper, there is nothing to engage with. You have to understand that while visitors want to be informed, they also want to be able to act on that information as easily as possible. For this reason, it is of utmost importance that you have call to action elements at intervals to keep visitors engaged.

Finally, on the homepage, there is no reference to some key aspects of the website. There is a blog but we can not see that on the homepage. There is a video section that contains videos from his Youtube channel. This would have a lot of benefits for both the website and channel but it is omitted on the homepage.

There is a lot that needs to be improved on the homepage but I cannot cover them all in this review. Anyways, let us jump to the books page.

Redesign of Books page

On this page you can see the first section, where you have featured books, it appears the aim was a masonry layout but that layout doesn't fit that content type and position. A simple section with 4 columns would have achieved a far greater results. The masonry layout has created a non-uniform look with a lot of space on the sides and a long middle column. A simple section with same height and uniform spacing will create a better look and experience.

Also, the section below that, where you have the list of books. This section can be improved if the background is made white instead of blue. Users are more familiar with white pages than blue pages so while it might not wow them, it definitely reduces the chance of a negative experience. The individual sections should also be alternated and there should be a uniform length of text for each book. Look at the design I made below for reference.

Conclusion

To ensure this isn't too long to read and it only addresses the key issues, those are all the issues I will be addressing today. If these changes will be made, it will result in significant increase in engagement and conversion. I estimate about 20% increase in conversion rate and increased traffic also. So, if your website have any of the issues addressed in this review or you are an author and you want to improve your website, then comment below so I can take a look at it with you.