September Marketing Book Review

Marketing Book review by Al Harberg, the press release guy from DP Directory, Inc.

Homepage Usability: 50 Websites Deconstructed

by Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir (published by New Riders)

Jakob Nielsen, known as the guru of web site usability, charges $10,000(US) to evaluate a company's home page (not their website - their home page). In this book, he talks about all of the criteria that he uses when optimizing a customer's home page, and gives 50 in-depth examples. Even though this book is a tad old, it will increase a software developer's sales by many, many times the book's cover price.

Homepage Usability is really two books:

In the first 53 pages, Nielsen talks about the purpose of a homepage, and discusses his 113 guidelines for evaluating a homepage. He has keen insights into communicating your site's purpose, information about your company, the site's content, links, navigation, search-engine, shortcuts, graphics and design, user interface, window titles, URLs, news releases, popup windows and splash screens, and tools for gathering customer data and fostering community. The information is easy to understand, and easy to put into practice on your own site.

In the remaining 250 pages, Nielsen deconstructs 50 web sites from companies with high name-recognition. In detail, he inspects every inch of their homepages, and offers suggestions and criticism. He breaks every homepage screen into its component parts: operating system and browser control (roughly 19 percent of the real estate, using Internet Explorer), welcome and site identity, navigation, content of interest, ads and sponsorship, self-promotion, filler, and unused portions of the homepage. The percentages allocated to the various categories vary from site to site, by enormous amounts. It's fascinating to see the different approaches that major companies use on their homepages.

Most of the material in this book was developed by watching real users access real web sites. So, when Nielsen recommends that you include a search box on your web site, that you place it in the upper-right corner of your homepage, and you label the button "Search" (rather than "Find" or "Go"), he's not talking about his personal tastes - you're reading actual field experience with real users.

As a result, the book's recommendations carry much more weight than the typical marketing book's suggestions that are based on hypothetical theories or personal preferences.

Nielsen's selection of websites is not ideal for the typical micro Independent Software Vendor (mISV). The companies and institutions tend to be huge, and as a result, their concerns are different than the problems that software developers deal with every day. For example, programmers rarely have to include stock quotes, news for stockholders, investor press releases, links to multi-national legal pages, or other issues that Fortune-100 companies address.

On the other hand, it's fun and easy to browse through the 50 web sites, looking for ideas that we can use on our own homepages. And for every idea that we can find, Nielsen includes detailed comments, criticisms, and suggestions.

It's an expensive book, and worth every penny. If you only read the first 53 pages, the book will pay for itself over and over.

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