Comments on: VHI.ie – 5 Simple Steps to Improve UX 100%

By: webmaster

webmaster — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 15:03:55 +0000

Hi Derek

I’m not convinced that ‘click here’ is the most effective way to inform users about navigational elements. I just cant help thinking effective UI design would remove the need for ‘click here’. But hey, that’s just my opinion

Thanks for dropping by, rgds
Richard

By: Better Late Than Never Links | Ireland SEO Marketing Online

Better Late Than Never Links | Ireland SEO Marketing Online — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 17:26:52 +0000

[...] Experience and testing. As always Richard provides brilliant advice which you can read in his post providing 5 simple user experience steps for VHI.ie I have to admit that I’ve learned a lot from that [...]

By: Derek

Derek — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 00:59:52 +0000

Totally on the money Richard, with maybe the exception of click here, for some internet novices and im sure with the age profile of a large portion vhi clients it cant do any harm to make the action as obvious as possible. You had time to play around with google chrome yet,
Derek

By: admin

admin — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 15:45:21 +0000

@Chad – it depends on the domain host I’d imagine. GoDaddy let you do some stuff like this.

It also depends on your server OS. MS servers have a different way of handling this.

You can also do the redirects at the script level. It incurs a little more overhead, and I’d always try to get the server to do this, but if all else fails use scripts.

Rgds, and thanks for commenting
Richard

By: Chad

Chad — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 21:10:44 +0000

@Richard – a very informative analysis on search engine optimisation you have there. btw, does the www and non-www only controllable through htaccess or through your domain name host?

By: Richard Hearne

Richard Hearne — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 08:20:11 +0000

@Neil D – your comment got filtered out by Askimet. Sorry about that. Thanks for commenting.

Rgds
Richard

By: Ad Manager

Ad Manager — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 04:25:06 +0000

I second your recommendation in staying with conventions, especially for hyperlinks. There are too many ways to make fancy links but only a few usable ones.

By: Richard Hearne

Richard Hearne — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 12:54:03 +0000

Hey Tom

Good to e-see you.

I’m not actually against ‘click here’, just not happy when buttons look so little like buttons that ‘click here’ is required. I honestly think that designers should be able to come up with better mechanisms. Personal bias I suppose.

Rgds, and thanks for dropping by
Richard

By: Tom Doyle

Tom Doyle — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 10:56:09 +0000

Hi Richard

As usual some great tips on how people can improve their websites. The only thing I don’t agree with you on is the “Click here” point.

From my experience, I always found that “telling” your visitors what to do will get better results in terms of click throughs and conversions.

You should look at Brian Clark’s simple experiment – http://www.copyblogger.com/click-here/ – the results are very convincing.

This does of course go against what the WAI accessibility guidelines, which is another days work – but none the less, I wouldn’t get VHI to change this, it’s probably the most clicked buttons on the site based on your other findings!

By: Neil D

Neil D — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 00:27:05 +0000

Nice analysis of VHI’s site. The non-www problem is something that has always puzzled me also.

A good example I have seen recently is the Companies House site which must be one of the most-visited sites in the UK. However, http://companieshouse.gov.uk/ returns a 404

changing the htaccess to redirect to (what google calls) the canonical version of the domain is a 30 sec job. Makes you wonder sometimes!