Homepage Usability Book Review

50 Websites Deconstructed

Homepage Usability is a larger than normal type of book, probably more of a type of ‘coffee table’ book, which looks very glossy with lots of photographs in, and looks good laying around your office or home.

As we all know your home page of your web site is very important as it can the first place that a lot of your site visitors first arrive at. We all also know that first impressions last, and homepages need to make an instantly good impression and be easy to use.

Homepage Usability starts in the first 50 pages discussing homepage guidelines. These are the types of items that you must have on your homepage and it discusses where most people expect to find these items on the page and what they expect them to be called or labelled.

The first 50 pages are a great introduction to homepage usability and tell you the basics of good page design such as what to call the search box and where most people place it, as well as what to call the ‘contact us’ or ‘about us’ pages.

The remainder of the book is given to snapshots of company homepages from 2001. All the major internet players are mentioned in the book including the Amazon and Microsoft websites. Each homepage is then discussed and its good and bad points are noted. Even though some of the homepages may seem dated from 2001, the principles of homepage usability and the tips offered are still very current.

Overall Homepage Usability is a good book if you need to make sure your homepage design is the best it can be. After reading through all of the 50 homepage examples you will get a good idea of what to include and what not to includes on your homepage. Homepage Usability is not a book to read though, it does have text against each of the 50 homepages but most of the pages are taken up by the large snapshots of the homepages. Homepage Usability is more of a coffee table book or reference book.