Better Homes & Gardens Website Design Review

ARTICLE SNIPPET - Mequoda Revisits a Review of Better Homes & Gardens' Website Design to See What's Been Improved Since Last Year, Finding its Strategic Intent Clearer, its Interactive Content Better, but its Affordance Still Lacking

Last year we reviewed 10 consumer magazine websites, including the Better Homes & Gardens website and rated them against 10 heuristics or rules, the foundation guidelines of what would become the Mequoda Website Design Guidelines. We thought it would be interesting and instructional to go back to the Better Homes & Gardens website, or BHG.com and see if there have been changes made in their website design over the past 12 months and where they stood regarding the four additional heuristics we've added in that time.

• Interactive content makes your site stickiest when it's all about the user
• Getting clear on the strategic intent of your site is critical… figure out what the first, second and third intents of your site are and make them the focus of your visitor's initial experience
• Underline your links when you really want users to use them
• Improving load time is important in overall website design—despite the complexity of the site, Better Homes & Gardens website loads incredibly fast
• The real beauty of Better Homes & Gardens is that the print product and the website are consistently complimentary—they've tackled the tricky problem of differentiation in a manner that makes both of their versions valuable to their readers

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