Jun 242008
 

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

columns 300x86

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!