Well put, a man after my own heart... retail websites are supposed to encourage the purchase of items not be ads for website designers to congratulate themselves on how clever they are and try to win awards...
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Originally Posted by Worldwalker
I am a professional. My comments above were only the tip of the iceberg.
What it comes down to is the purpose of a website should be to sell products -- but all too often, and I think it happened in this case, the website is built to sell websites. The designer's audience is the client, not the client's customers, because after all that's who's cutting his check. And the client, busy going "oooh" and "aaah" over his pretty new website, doesn't even realize that he's made things worse for the people who are cutting his check.
You have to look at it like a user: I just went to this website. What am I most likely to want to do? If you're a publisher, I probably went to your website to buy a book. Don't fill all the space with pretty pictures, don't tell me all about your authors, don't give me your company history -- sell me a book! All the rest of that stuff is secondary, for the people researching authors, considering buying stock, or whatever. The people who are going to give you money are, by and large, looking for a way to buy a book.
Replace "book" with the purpose of any other website, as necessary. People have their own agendas: they want to go to your website, find what they're looking for as quickly as possible, complete their task, and move on. They have plenty of things to do with their time, and trying to figure out your website isn't any part of it. Come. Get. Go. That's what they want, and a website that makes that easy will get a lot more of the "Get", which is the part that involves money.
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