It's all about the navigation. You'd think this would be obvious--until you try to get somewhere in the average website. For example, last fall I found myself shopping for tulip bulbs on the Web. I'd procrastinated planting until the first snows were falling, and the local stores were out. So I went to Garden.com and found the bulbs I wanted. I clicked the order now button, then browsed the site a few minutes longer.
When I was ready to check out, I looked expectantly at the top of the page for a shopping cart or basket icon. No such luck. I hunted the page for a link to something familiar: check out, your account, or complete your order. No go. I had no clue how to navigate to the page that would let me place my order. If I hadn't been desperate to buy those tulip bulbs, I would have left the site (and never returned). After combing the site for another 10 minutes, I finally learned that Garden.com's term for shopping cart is wheelbarrow and that there is in fact a wheelbarrow text link on each page.
Screen real estate is precious. Yet conventional wisdom has you stuffing every Web page with links to every section of your site. Why? If I'm shopping in the Books section of Amazon.com for a book about Web navigation, why would I want a link to Amazon's Toys & Video Games section? And in the rare times I do want this, I can use the search tool provided on every page. Or I can click once for the home page and navigate to another section from there. If Amazon were to recognize this, its designers could recover a solid half-inch-high swath of prime screen real estate at the top of each page.
