Buttons, links, and forms

Web pages are generally made of only four things: buttons, links, forms and contents. You could have a great website with just these.

Contents are far more important than the others, combined.  If you have unique, new, and relevant content for a visitor, she is more likely to bear with the poor design of your site; more likely to come back; and more likely to spread the word for you. People usually only care about contents and are willing to overlook everything else if you truly have something that they want.

Simply put, if you have an iPhone, the package doesn’t really matter.  Unfortunately, for those of us who don’t work for Apple, we don’t have that luxury.

Buttons, links and forms put together the user experience, and in today’s online world, a great user experience outweighs a good look anytime. They should NOT be the same size or lined up all together. The most useful ones should always be the biggest or the most visible.  If it takes you more than 30 seconds to ponder whether a button/link/form should be created, chances are, it probably shouldn’t exist.

The difference between Yahoo and Google: when I visit them for the very first time, I know exactly what I need to do on Google, and I would be very much distracted on Yahoo’s homepage.  That is the reason why only 10.5% of the users on Yahoo use search.yahoo.com while over 55% of the users on Google use Google.com to search.

So here are some quick fixes for your existing webpages:

#1) Start tracking which buttons/links/forms get used the most and make them more visible.

#2) Use the data to figure out which pages on your site are more relevant to your visitors and make them more accessible.

#3) Over time, eliminate all unused, unvisited and unwanted links/buttons/forms/webpages, and put in some new ones and repeat step #1.

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