Quote:
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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I'm a professional as well and have to agree almost 100%. The site has to be designed from a users point of view and it has to be tested and evaluated not only from that perspective but from someone that fits that category - an actual user. Even better a focus group taken at random should have had access to the development site at some stage. The sites that get the most positive comments and the most traffic are the ones where the user base feels a sense of ownership in the site. And having a focus group of users feel like their opinion matters is a great way to achieve that.
I run into that problem where I work all the time, where people expect me to design the perfect site that just works right out of the box and they don't understand that it often takes several iterations of development, testing, re-development, then re-testing, and so on. Sure I can make it intuitive, but intuitive to me, the guy building the navigation is going to be light years different from the end user who has no idea what I was thinking at the time.
During the development and testing there should be specific tasks established, programmed for, and then tested. Even if it is something simple like navigation. For example, one of the best things about Baen is their Webscriptions program. How do you find out info on it from their site. Hmmm, well lets see if there is webscriptions link somewhere. Ok there is on the bottom... click .... hmm ok there are some books for sale here. To find out anything more on them you have to click the FAQ link at the top or the other webscriptions link on the left, under categories. A useful tool for designing the navigation is the site map.
Hopefully, the new home page is short stop on the road to a whole new site. However, if they are not paying much attention to their site in order to keep publishing some really great books at good prices with no DRM - well I really can't complain too much!!