While I’ve been reading a lot of different articles and books related to Search Engine Optimization, I recently picked up what many will argue is the best book on web usability:
Don’t Make Me Think
by Steve Krugg
This book should be on the must read list of anyone that plans on starting an online business or even just a website in general.
While I currently use the Blogger.com templates and software to publish my blogs, at some point in the future I would like to be able to design, create and maintain my own templates and sites, independent of Blogger or WordPad. I think this book will give me a good start when I start to map out what I would like my sites to look like.
While many of Krugg’s points are just plain common sense, the way he lays everything out makes it easy to see how you could implement the changes throughout your site.
The most important thing I took away from the book was that a website (specifically an e-commerce site) is set up in pretty much the same way as a store; there are lots of different ways to get to the product you want. The key is to make the shopping experience as simple as possible, so simple that you shouldn’t even need to think about it. If the customer has to think, they’ll go somewhere else.
Make sure that you pick up a copy of this from Amazon and add it to your “must have” collection of business books.