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Book 1 Checklists: Tactical Groundwork from 2014

Before the Experience Optimization Framework existed as a named six-stage loop, it existed as three hundred hands-on tactical tips in Alex’s 2014 book, Boost E-commerce Sales and Make More Money. These checklists pull a handful of those tips into a usable, page-cited reference: honestly dated 2014-era tactical groundwork, not a claim about current best practice or a specific client result. See where the framework itself comes from for how this tactical work was later organized into a named process.

Quick wins checklist source: p. 36

Before making broad changes, the book’s own advice was to find where the existing traffic already concentrates, then work from there.

Identify the pages already receiving the most traffic, and prioritize those for improvement first, rather than starting with low-traffic pages.
Identify which of those high-traffic pages are actually generating revenue, not just visits.
Identify which pages have the highest bounce rate, and treat those as the first place to look for friction.

Landing page checklist source: p. 37-38

The book’s core landing-page advice was message match: whatever brought someone to the page should be reflected in what they land on, and different landing-page formats suit different intents.

Match the landing page’s message to whatever ad, search result, or link brought the visitor there; a mismatch creates friction immediately.
Distinguish landing pages meant to capture a lead (not-yet-ready-to-buy visitors) from pages meant to close a sale outright.
Test sending traffic to a product category page versus a single product page versus a purpose-built landing page; the book’s own position was that the right answer differs by audience and product, and has to be tested, not assumed.
Consider a longer, story-driven page for a product that needs more explanation before a visitor is ready to decide.

Social proof checklist source: p. 39-40

The book’s social-proof advice centered on making credibility visible and specific, not just present.

Place recognizable proof (press mentions, credibility marks, reviews) high enough on the page that a visitor sees it without scrolling.
Put reviews and testimonials in more than one place: the homepage, the product page, and the checkout path, not just one dedicated page.
Keep testimonials easy to read at a glance (large enough text, the relevant phrase visible), rather than dense blocks a visitor has to search through.

Header checklist source: p. 44-45

The book treated the header as a utility area with a small number of jobs, not a place for everything.

If phone contact matters for the business, make the number easy to find and pair it with a specific reason to call, not a generic “contact us.”
Keep the search function visible and clearly labeled, not buried behind an icon a visitor has to guess at.
If live chat is offered, make it visibly available rather than a passive widget nobody notices.

Navigation checklist source: p. 46

The book’s navigation advice was to organize around what visitors are actually looking for, not around internal structure.

Order navigation categories by what visitors actually look for most, not by internal org structure or alphabetical convenience.
Organize categories by product/use type, not by internal brand or supplier names a visitor wouldn’t recognize.
Keep customer-service navigation (account, order status, support) visually distinct from product-browsing navigation, so the two don’t compete for attention.

About page checklist source: p. 49

The book’s About-page advice was to treat it as a credibility and connection page, not just a company history.

Restate the core value proposition on the About page, not just the homepage; visitors sometimes land here first.
Show the people behind the business where it’s genuinely relevant to trust (who a visitor is actually buying from), not as decoration.
Keep the page short and benefit-focused rather than a long, feature-heavy company history.
Make the path to contact and to frequently asked questions clearly reachable from this page.

What’s dated, and why these are still useful

Some of the book’s specific product and vendor mentions from 2014 are eleven years old and deliberately not repeated here. What’s preserved is the underlying discipline behind each tip: look at where attention actually is before guessing where to improve, match the message to visitor intent, make proof visible rather than buried, and organize around the visitor’s goal, not the business’s internal structure. That discipline is the same one the current six-stage Experience Optimization Framework formalizes today.