This book is a child borne, like many others, of a cosmic combination of passion, frustration, experience, and luck.

Passion—we quite simply love what we do and care deeply about the results. We hope we’re able to communicate this in our writing.

Frustration—it seems for every victory we gain with clients, for every improvement we see through to completion, there are more battles to fi ght. And the word about usable, business-focused web design isn’t spreading quickly enough for us. We joke (mostly) about being “endlessly offended” by the overall state of web design.

Experience—our combined 22 years working in the web space have taught us a great deal about success and what works—and about humility and the importance of testing assumptions, even “expert” ones. This book is the result of an ongoing effort to correlate and articulate our expertise in a clear, simple way; what we do, why we do it, and what we think is most important.

Luck—the stars surely collided to instigate this book. First, Lance decided to create a new presentation about how small changes to a web page design could increase effectiveness and conversions. Next, an acquisitions editor from Peachpit Press happened to see Lance present at Web Design World Seattle in 2006 and offered him a book deal practically on the spot. And lastly, as soon as Lance signed the book deal, he and his wife discovered they were expecting twins. So Lance turned to his colleague Sandra, pointing out they’d successfully co-written many an analysis, and how different could writing an entire book possibly be… ?