You are here: Home > Market Places > My #2 Pet Hate of Poor WebSite Design – Blog Navigation

Market Places

Published on December 23rd, 2010 | by Matthew Ogborne

2

My #2 Pet Hate of Poor WebSite Design – Blog Navigation

Following on from early article on My #1 Pet Hate of Poor WebSite Design this one gets #2 place as it drives just as bonkers as the first one.

Can you see it yet?

The owners of this blog know the issue, they have tried to combat it.

Spotted it yet?

Blog Navigation

Yep, its the home link in the top left.

Firstly lets not diss this company, their rankings were quite high for the project I am working on, although not what I was looking for, my searches landed me in their blog. This is absolutely fantastic, this company has been leveraging the use of a company blog and just so happens they also have recently released their own iPhone app. Nice.

But what gets my goat is the navigation at the top, because the blog (wordpress) is not themed in-line with their main website, see main website and their blog so when I manually hacked the URL to remove the ‘blog.’ I was a little shocked to see their main website was nothing like their blog. But a common theme is not even my point here, just being able to readily navigate is.

The blog looks like Thesis (edit: doh, it says it in the footer), which is an extremely powerful template, so they have forked out +£100 for the theme, but completely (well mostly) failed to remember that browsing readers assume that the top left is the ‘reset button’.

Now this ‘reset button’ on this blog needs two uses, one to get the blog home and one to get to the website home. So….. Label them!

Almost

If you look closely at the image above or on their blog, you will notice that they are at least aware they have an issue transferring the browser back to their main site, they’ve added some text and a link to the right, but sadly, this is not where people look for navigation and the big fat ‘reset-get-me-back-home-again’ button.

Sooooo close, yet sooooo far.

Please stamp this in your head now

I’ll leave you with this godly statement, please carry it with you always:

Customers are idiots
Do not make an idiot to try to think
Its dangerous

Tags: Pet Hate, WordPress

About the Author

Matthew Ogborne
"Selling an item online is easy, but making living from a business that sells online, well that's something different entirely!"
Get Help Today.