My addiction to buttons
I've been soaking up everything I can about usability lately, and yet, when it came time to redesign the debabblog, I fell right back into the same bad habits. Case in point: I've always designed navigation as an element to be added later, working a horizontal or vertical button layout into the design with the equivalent of "navigation goes here".Of course, that assumes that I'm going to produce a website with 5-8 buttons and that it doesn't really matter what those buttons are. Deep down, I know that's a mistake, but last month, once again, I started designing buttons for the site without even bothering to plan what those buttons might be.
Finally, though, I caught myself in the act. As I was trying to sort out what needed to go into the navigation, it dawned on me that a lot of the usual pages on a corporate website (e.g. "About Us", "Contact Us", etc.) just weren't relevant to a blog, at least not at this stage. The whole point of the redesign was to simplify, and so I went back to the drawing board.
First, I decided the "about" content could just go in a short paragraph (the one in the right-hand column). The debabblog isn't primarily a big advertisement for my consulting practice, so I didn't worry about the contact information and company branding. There were basically only two things that were key: (1) that people be able to read the blog entries with a minimum of distraction, and (2) that they be able to easily subscribe.
So, "Subscribe" got a big, beautiful button, and the vast majority of the space is left for content. I originally had today's date in the grey header, but that was replaced with some simple secondary text links, including the archive. I never imagined that the end result would be a one-button site, but, in my opinion, it works.
