Advertising sales website BuySellAds has received a major overhaul, some of the details of which have been outlined in a blog post by site founder Todd Garland.
In the post, Garland described the new site as a "single, massive, leap" rather than an incremental step, and said this was needed because it was getting increasingly difficult for advertisers to find great placements within BSA's inventory. A number of changes were subsequently made, including: reworked primary navigation; the separation of 'searching' and 'browsing' as actions; turning the marketplace into the home page; simplifying the sign-up process; enabling faster access to important information; UI improvements; and clearly differentiating between the different mediums – websites, tweets, mobile web, apps, email, RSS – that the company supports.
Garland concluded his post by saying that the process not only resulted in a fun release for his company, but it also provided the foundation for further improvements. In a sense, it's also a good check-list for any designers and developers immersing themselves in redesigns of websites. BSA's improvements centre on fundamentals and lessons everyone can learn from: ensure that the most important content is up-front when someone visits a site; make user interaction such as sign-ups as simple and pain-free as possible; differentiate things that need differentiation in a clear manner; and, where possible, always strive to improve the user interface.
