Life of an Online Business – My Pillow place

Studying for changes

I’ve started to read a book called “Don’t Make Me Think” by Steve Krug which is about Website Usability.  The prevailing idea in the book is to make a website as user friendly and obvious as possible.  If visitors come to a site, no matter where they enter, they should know what page their on, what the site is about, how to navigate it.

So, even though I’m only about halfway through the book, I’ve evaluated one of my most visited web pages and made some changes.  This page would be the Home Page at www.my-pillow-place.com.  Well, what did I change?  The first thing I did was realize that I broke website convention on my original home page design.  Most people who use the internet recognize that blue underlined text is a link to another page.  Well, my home page has category images and a blue box with a category keywords that can be clicked to get to that category’s splash page. 

I really don’t know if this is not clear, but the boxes do break the convention of looking like a clickable link.  So, to make it absolutely clear that you can navigate from the category text, I removed the boxes.  I then created a clickable, blue underlined text link to the second tier pages of my site.  Will this make a difference?  I’m not sure.  But making it easier to do anything on our site could help visitors get further into the site and make their way to the products they search for.