Pretty much every website I’ve ever been involved with starts to get out of hand with features and useless doodads eventually. Especially when the site has remained stagnant for a while. Picture this: 5 - 6 people sitting around a small conference table somewhere, talking about how to “improve” their current site. One of the higher ups gets the idea that it would be pretty sweet if we made the entire site INTERACTIVE; just convert the whole thing over to flash. Sound familiar? About once a month I have to talk people I work with off the ledge of committing Internet suicide by adding new great features that the boss thinks the customer really wants.

Even I have to remind myself sometimes to Keep It Simple Stupid. In my mind, this is really the key to a user-friendly site. Take all the stuff that doesn’t contribute to the sale and get rid of it. I made a big boo boo one time by adding an interactive feature to a site that the customers absolutely loved. Unfortunately, it just served as a distraction from the buying process and conversions plummeted. People were still visiting the site, but just messing around with the new tool instead of buying things. We had to take the tool back off until we could figure out a way to make it assist the buying process rather than distracting from it. Looking back on it I want to slap myself for making that mistake in the first place: “Keep it simple, you r-tard!”

When designing or adding to your site, apply the K.I.S.S. method to everything: your homepage, your navigation, your shopping cart, your checkout. Less really is more! Now, good luck convincing the boss that.