TABLE OF CONTENTS The Web is about content, first and foremost. Web analyst Jakob Nielsen writes:
Ultimately, users visit your website for its content. Everything else is just the backdrop. The design is there to allow people to access the content. (Nielsen,1999 )
It doesn't matter whether a website is easy or difficult to use if it provides nothing useful, entertaining, up-to-date, or trustworthy. Few people will go there, and the few that do won't return.
To reflect the primacy of content on the Web, I begin with a chapter about bloopers in Web content. These are bloopers in the information a site provides about products, services, or the organization itself. They are therefore more concerned with information design or information architecture (Rosenfeld and Morville 2002) than they are with Web design per se. Nevertheless, content is so important on the Web that any book about Web design mistakes must discuss problems of content.
Home pages should allow website visitors to determine the site's purpose in a quick scan of the page. People want to quickly determine whether the site has something of interest to them. Home pages that don't let users easily do this commit not only a content blooper, but also a navigation blooper.
Look at the home page of PriceWaterhouseCoopers' web-site (Figure 1.1) and try to figure out what the...
