The Stranger's Long Neck

The Stranger's Long Neck
Author: Gerry McGovern
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2010-06-17
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1408114429

The long-awaited new title from THE corporate expert on building the right web presence to drive sales! In an age that is exploding with information, it's now critically important for companies to identify what truly matters on their Web site. The web customer is a “stranger” online to web teams who must work in a medium where it is very difficult to know who is clicking around on your site. Every Web site has a “long neck” or a small set of tasks that are very important to its customers. If you don't make these tasks easy and fast to complete, your customers will go to your competition. This book will give you practical advice and case studies on how to tune in effectively to deliver precisely what your web customers want to make the sale! Gerry McGovern is widely regarded as the number one worldwide authority on managing web content as a business asset. Named as one of the 100 most influential figures in e-commerce in the UK and Ireland, he has appeared on CNN , CNBC and BBC television and has been featured in numerous print media publications. Top 5 Tips for Improving Your Website by Gerry McGovern 1. On the Web, content may be king but the customer is dictator. There's one word to describe the web customer: IMPATIENT. 2. Traditional marketing and communication is about GETTING ATTENTION. Web marketing and communication is about PAYING ATTENTION. When customers are at your website you already have their attention. Don't waste their time by telling them things they already know. 3. Every website has a small set of top tasks what I call the “long neck” that customers expect to complete quickly and easily. The customers' top tasks are often not what the organisation thinks they are—or wants them to be! 4. The BIGGEST key to website improvement and efficiency of “long neck” consumer tasks is most often overlooked: companies must do rigorous, methodical and continuous testing! Great web management is based on facts about your consumers, not opinions offered by the smartest people in your company. 5. The Web is about doing, not talking about doing. A great website puts task-completion features on the homepage. In Web 1.0 you saw a picture of a hotel room on the homepage of a hotel website. Now, you book your room on the homepage. Find out more in The Stranger's Long Neck

The Stranger's Long Neck

The Stranger's Long Neck
Author: Gerry McGovern
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2010-06-01
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1408134292

The Stranger's Long Neck is a practical guide for any manager wishing to improve their organisation's online performance. Web content specialist, Gerry McGovern, explains that all websites have a small set of tasks, or 'long necks', that are important to its customers and that must be easy to complete or customers will go elsewhere. The Stranger's Long Neck shows how to tune in effectively to what your customers want - and then deliver it with aplomb. Understanding customer needs can be a difficult task when customers are 'strangers', in that he or she is always 'on the outside', particularly so in an online environment. Using case studies including Tetra Pak, Microsoft and the NHS, and illustrated with web shots throughout, The Stranger's Long Neck shows how organisations can use the 'long neck' theory to create and manage efficient and user-friendly websites.

The Stranger on the Train

The Stranger on the Train
Author: Abbie Taylor
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2014-05-27
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1476754993

A mother’s worst nightmare: the subway doors close with her baby son still on the train. In this suspenseful debut novel, a woman goes to unimaginable lengths to get her child back. A struggling, single mother, Emma sometimes wishes that her thirteen-month-old son Ritchie would just disappear. Then, one quiet Sunday evening, after a sinister encounter on the London Underground—Ritchie does just that. Emma immediately reports his abduction to the police but there she faces a much worse situation than she ever imagined. Why do the police seem so reluctant to help her? And why do they think she would want hurt her own child? If Emma wants Ritchie back, she’ll have to find him herself. With the help of a stranger named Rafe, the one person who seems to believe her, Emma sets off in search of her son. She is determined to find Ritchie no matter what it takes…but who exactly is the real enemy here? "A heart-stopper” (Publishers Weekly, starred review) with dark twists and intertwining narratives, The Stranger on the Train is an unforgettable, “first-rate debut thriller” (Washington Post) that you will keep you guessing until the shattering finale.

All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers: A Novel

All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers: A Novel
Author: Larry McMurtry
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
Total Pages: 283
Release: 2018-05-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1631493582

A young writer hits the dusty Texas highway for the California coast in this “brilliant . . . funny and dangerously tender” (Time) tale of art and sacrifice. Hailed as one of “the best novels ever set in America’s fourth largest city” (Douglas Brinkley, New York Times Book Review), All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers is a powerful demonstration of Larry McMurtry’s “comic genius, his ability to render a sense of landscape, and interior intellection tension” (Jim Harrison, New York Times Book Review). Desperate to break from the “mundane happiness” of Houston, budding writer Danny Deck hops in his car, “El Chevy,” bound for the West Coast on a road trip filled with broken hearts and bleak realities of the artistic life. A cast of unforgettable characters joins the naïve troubadour’s pilgrimage to California and back to Texas, including a cruel, long-legged beauty; an appealing screenwriter; a randy college professor; and a genuine if painfully “normal” friend. Since the novel’s publication in 1972, Danny Deck has “been far more successful at getting loved by readers than he ever was at getting loved by the women in his life” (McMurtry), a testament to the author’s incomparable talent for capturing the essential tragicomedy of the human experience.

This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers

This Brilliant Darkness: A Book of Strangers
Author: Jeff Sharlet
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2020-02-11
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1324003219

“A luminous, moving and visual record of fleeting moments of connection.” —New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice A visionary work of radical empathy. Known for immersion journalism that is more immersed than most people are willing to go, and for a prose style that is somehow both fierce and soulful, Jeff Sharlet dives deep into the darkness around us and awaiting us. This work began when his father had a heart attack; two years later, Jeff, still in his forties, had a heart attack of his own. In the grip of writerly self-doubt, Jeff turned to images, taking snapshots and posting them on Instagram, writing short, true stories that bloomed into documentary. During those two years, he spent a lot of time on the road: meeting strangers working night shifts as he drove through the mountains to see his father; exploring the life and death of Charley Keunang, a once-aspiring actor shot by the police on LA’s Skid Row; documenting gay pride amidst the violent homophobia of Putin’s Russia; passing time with homeless teen addicts in Dublin; and accompanying a lonely woman, whose only friend was a houseplant, on shopping trips. Early readers have called this book “incantatory,” the voice “prophetic,” in “James Agee’s tradition of looking at the reality of American lives.” Defined by insomnia and late-night driving and the companionship of other darkness-dwellers—night bakers and last-call drinkers, frightened people and frightening people, the homeless, the lost (or merely disoriented), and other people on the margins—This Brilliant Darkness erases the boundaries between author, subject, and reader to ask: how do people live with suffering?

Top Tasks: A How-to Guide

Top Tasks: A How-to Guide
Author: Gerry McGovern
Publisher: Lulu.com
Total Pages: 186
Release: 2018
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1916444601

Essence of Top Tasks is a prioritized list of what matters most to customers. You then continuously improve these top tasks based on evidence of customers trying to complete them. Developed as a result of 15 years of research and practice. Implemented by some of the world's largest organizations: Cisco, Microsoft, NetApp, IBM, Google, European Union, Toyota, Tetra Pak, and hundreds more. More than 300,000 customers have participated in Top Tasks studies in over 40 countries and 30 languages.

The Strangers

The Strangers
Author: Jacqueline West
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2013
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0803736908

After something crucial goes missing from the strange old house on Linden Street, 11-year-old Olive and her friends must decide how to get it backNput their faith in a strange and dangerous magic, their odd new neighbors, or someone more uncertain and terrifying than both.

The Strangers on Montagu Street

The Strangers on Montagu Street
Author: Karen White
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2011-11-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 110154581X

Charleston psychic Melanie Middleton discovers the past isn't finished revealing unsettling secrets in the third novel in the New York Times bestselling Tradd Street series. With her relationship with writer Jack Treholm as shaky as the foundation of her family home, Melanie’s juggling a number of problems. Like restoring her Tradd Street house...and resisting her mother’s pressure to ‘go public’ with her talent—a sixth sense that unites them to the lost souls of the dead. But Melanie never anticipated her new problem. Her name is Nola, Jack’s estranged young daughter who appears on their doorstep, damaged, lonely and defiantly immune to her father’s attempts to reconnect. Melanie understands the emotional chasm all too well. As a special, bonding gift Jack’s mother buys Nola an antique dollhouse—a precious tableaux of a perfect Victorian family. Melanie hopes the gift will help thaw Nola’s reserve and draw her into the family she’s never known. At first, Nola is charmed, and Melanie is delighted—until night falls, and the most unnerving shadows are cast within its miniature rooms. By the time Melanie senses a malevolent presence she fears it may already be too late. A new family has accepted her unwitting invitation to move in—with their own secrets, their own personal demons, and a past that’s drawing Nola into their own inescapable darkness...

Stranger

Stranger
Author: Sherwood Smith
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 427
Release: 2014-11-13
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 1101615397

Many generations ago, a mysterious cataclysm struck the world. Governments collapsed and people scattered, to rebuild where they could. A mutation, "the Change,” arose, granting some people unique powers. Though the area once called Los Angeles retains its cultural diversity, its technological marvels have faded into legend. "Las Anclas" now resembles a Wild West frontier town… where the Sheriff possesses superhuman strength, the doctor can warp time to heal his patients, and the distant ruins of an ancient city bristle with deadly crystalline trees that take their jewel-like colors from the clothes of the people they killed. Teenage prospector Ross Juarez’s best find ever – an ancient book he doesn’t know how to read – nearly costs him his life when a bounty hunter is set on him to kill him and steal the book. Ross barely makes it to Las Anclas, bringing with him a precious artifact, a power no one has ever had before, and a whole lot of trouble.

The Stranger

The Stranger
Author: Albert Camus
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2012-08-08
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307827666

With the intrigue of a psychological thriller, Camus's masterpiece gives us the story of an ordinary man unwittingly drawn into a senseless murder on an Algerian beach. Behind the intrigue, Camus explores what he termed "the nakedness of man faced with the absurd" and describes the condition of reckless alienation and spiritual exhaustion that characterized so much of twentieth-century life. First published in 1946; now in translation by Matthew Ward.