I've just been reading 'Homepage Usability' by Jakob Nielsen and Marie Tahir. In the UK, Waterstones have piles of them in a sale at 20.99 GBP.

While you may choose to ignore some of their advice, for many of us most of the guidelines are sensible.

I have re-done my Bricks and Brass homepage. The old one is at www.bricksandbrass.co.uk/index2.html.
The changes are:
- drop the watermark
- change the Title tag to have Bricks and Brass first so that it goes into Favourites in the best place
- remove a lot of the 'Welcome' content - they say it does not make so much sense now people are familiar with the web
- sharpen up the text to make it more active
- put the search at the top right
- put the Site Map in an obvious place
- put a strong tag line near the top of the page
- give fewer choices, sticking to the most important

I have also swapped the colours on my links - I had blue for 'visited' and red for 'not visited' - the wrong way round!

I also need to change the menu so that the current page is not clickable/active. And I need to stop my menu going scrollable for some of the largest areas of the site.

They give lots of other advice; some doesn't apply to me - no splash page, not TOO much on the home page, avoid the word 'links' (use a meaningful word or phrase), avoid frames, avoid confusing duplicate links/menus, design for 800x600 etc.

Any comments?!

www.bricksandbrass.co.uk