Yesterday I was running a workshop on blogging where I pointed out that you should include an email address in all articles you publish. That way, I argued, you can get to know exactly who is interested in your information. If you only included a link to your web site, you might get click throughs, but you wouldn’t know who from. One of the delegates said, however, that he would never respond to an email address simply from an article as he would like to find out more before making direct contact. This just goes to show how every one of your users is different. You need to provide a variety of means of contact if your web site is to succeed. Simply providing one method for people to find out more from one of your articles isn’t enough.
Online retailers don’t seem to learn about usability
Every year there are studies of leading web sites to see how close they are getting to providing a good experience for their users. Every year, major businesses and well known brands are criticised in
