As a result of attending the Silicon Valley Webguild’s Web 2.0 event at Google last week, I decided to spend some time this past weekend exploring some of the social networking and tagging sites that have been exploding since the whole Myspace shiznit hit the fan. I was amazed to see how bad the usability of some (not all) of these sites is.

If someone were ever to ask me the best single thing they could do to make their Website user-friendly, I’d say this:

Describe what you do on the homepage.

What is this Website? What can I do on it? Pretty simple. When I see a Website that does not follow this rule-of-thumb, I immediately assume they did not use a well-thought-out design process to build their site, and instead slapped it up there fast and cheap. I don’t have time to waste searching for what they do. I’m going to move on. exit page = entry page. pageviews = 1.