My #1 Pet Hate of Poor WebSite Design

Brace yourself, this one drives me utterly nuts and once you realise what it is, it’ll drive you nuts too!

Its so simple, the top left logo on any website should be a link to the homepage.

Is this soooooo god-dam hard to do? No, its not.

eBay listings are prolific offenders at missing this simple navigation aid. The logo in the top left should be a link, is this not common web courtesy? Is this not such common practice that anyone and everyone expects the brand logo to be a link to the home page? Please mentally weld this into your mind:

Top left,
Link to the homepage

Annoyance In Action

Here, see this in action at http://www.camisera.co.uk/ and don’t think its limited to their website, bingo thier eBay listings are the same.

No logo in the Top Left?

Simple, do what I have done and sit a 1 pixel transparent image in the top left that covers the picture of the dead mosquito. Yes it is invisible, but anyone navigating up there will get the hand cursor and naturally click ‘home’ on it.

The Importance of ‘Home’

Home is like a website reset button, if you get lost you can always go ‘home’ and start again. I’ve seen people do this several times on a site until they get where they want to be, its also highly suggested that you have a bread crumb trail in the header somehwere too like:

You are here: Home » Market Places » Amazon » Amazon IS Human – They Make Mistakes Too!

Don’t make your browsers think, they are too scatty to be put off by bad design. Serve them common and easy on a simple well formed plate of website fodder.