For class this week, I had the opportunity to read Steve Krug's Don't Make Me Think. As soon as I started reading Don’t Make Me Think I was immediately hooked. The writing style was so candid and humorous. The way that Steve Krug writes is so conversational and I could tell why his books have been popular. I agree with him in many aspects of the book. One recurring theme that Krug uses is the theme of keeping things simple. I agree that simplicity is very important for creating a good website. Often when I am online looking for something, I find myself getting discouraged if the specific part of the website that I am looking for is hard to find. When it comes to the Internet, convenience is better. I don’t like looking around for something. It should just be there when I need it. Krug definitely goes along with this. He even named his book after it, with the clever title, “Don’t Make Me Think”. There are some new things I learned about creating websites from this book, though. One thing I thought was particularly interesting was the idea of eliminating “happy talk”. Krug wrote about happy talk saying that it doesn’t convey any useful information and instead it focuses on saying how great the website is as opposed to explaining what makes the website great. Krug goes on about how important it is to omit needless words in general. Grabbing the attention of the reader is the most important and often they skim over big paragraphs of excessive information. Krug uses examples like comparing page names on websites to L.A. street signs. He says the page numbers need to be big and in the right place like street signs or else people could overlook them. As I have learned from this book, people don’t read pages… they scan them. I know I am personally guilty of doing this as well. Reading this book has made me aware of this fact and I now know that when creating a website I will make sure to highlight important parts of the websites in big letters and bold colors. That way, if users are on a mission they can easily access the info that they need and also the info that I want them to see. Another very important piece of advice that I have taken away from reading this book is the necessity of getting the message across with a good tagline, blurb, learn more section, etc. In my opinion, the best way to portray your message is in a catchy and informative tagline. According to the book, “A tagline is a pithy phrase that characterizes the whole enterprise, summing up what it is and what makes it great”. I learned that good taglines are six to eight words, an amount that is long enough to convey a full thought and also short enough for readers to easily absorb. An example that the book uses as a good tagline is from a breakfast blog. The tagline reads “In search of the best eggs in town”. The tagline is clever and lively. It also makes me think that my blogs are on the right track to having catchy taglines. I made a blog last semester about food and the tagline I used was “the search to find the best Mexican food in Gainesville”. In the future, I will continue to use clever and personable taglines because it is apparent that they are essential to creating a face for a website. From reading this book, I have learned a lot about the basics of web design and creating a user-friendly and easy-to-operate website. Simplicity and usability are key in the process.