Less is More…

Up until yesterday Haris.tv was using a plugin that provided visitors with an array of social bookmarking options that I decided, on review, was cluttering up the page layout. I chose to scrap it in favour of a cleaner and simpler design.

I wanted to provide visitors with a quick and easy method of sharing articles on Haris.tv but at the same time I didn’t want to clutter the layout.

I’m a firm believer in minimalism. There’s an overabundance of sites that try to cram as much as possible onto the users screen thinking if there’s more on offer, users are more likely to spot something of interest.

In reality, the opposite is true. People like simplicity. A page splattered with too many items is more likely to prevent visitors finding what they want amongst the chaos and will often result in abandonment.

From this auinteractive article titled ‘10 things that will make or break your website’, the top 2 items are:

1. EASY is the most important feature of any website
2. Visual design and copy are extremely important

With this in mind I set about redesigning the article footer and adopted Alex King’s more elegant Share This plugin that offers options for social bookmarking and email in a convenient popup form.

I created a trackback icon and sourced RSS and Comments icons and changed the colours of the plugin popup to suit the current page design.

I’m pleased with the results! To see the cool popup in action, click ‘Share This’ below.