Align Your Content

By Robert Campbell on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 Print This Post
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I was asked today to take a look at this site that sells kitchen sinks. It’s an online store serving the U.S. population, and they seriously had a lot of sinks to choose from. They obviously spent a great deal of time setting up the store with all the pictures, data, and simply getting an online store to work correctly. Problem was, they forgot to look at the site. At least the header that is.

Align Your Content

screen shot of header

Take a look at their header, and you will see what I mean when I say align your content, and limit the number of columns. They had TEN starting points in the header alone. Where is a visitor supposed to start? Not in the header, in this case.

The visitor would either need to use the left menu as a starting point, or to simply start clicking on the category links that are the sink thumbnails you see in the screen shot. The header has been rendered useless because it’s all over the place. It’s unfortunate because if you look closely at one of their category pages you will see they took the time to put in a breadcrumb type navigation menu within the header. In this case, it is nearly invisible, even though it is bold, and the first left item. Spend the time to vertically align your content? You bet!

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3 Comments on “Align Your Content”

  1. Mr.Mani says:

    Nice review of the design. Really this review made me to revamp my site a lot…

  2. You have done the hard part already by setting up the store. Fixing the header alone will help greatly. For those of you who are not aware of my usability analysis, here is the link: http://www.bestwebimage.com/?page_id=45 Well worth the money.

  3. Great analysis. I having selling home improvement products online for years. I thought I know the tricks of designing ecommerce sites. Your review made me realized that I still got lots more to learn.

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