As we coast into the holidays I’m trying to knock off many “regrettables” on my list.  Things that have been bothering me about Referly that I’ve put off fixing because they were tweaks.  But as we know from all our A/B testing and from customer feedback, sometimes what we view as tweaks are actually major improvements.  Sometimes the amount of new code is tiny (or even a net negative) but the impact can be huge.

It is with that in mind that I embarked to simply our navigation, reduce the visual importance of search and make our value proposition to visitors even more clear.  Check out the before and after screenshots:

BEFORE

Cluttered nav with many categories. Tall background image and box containing search as the primary call to action pushing most of the remaining page content below the fold. Hints of the first row of featured collections, but no text, just the tops of images that weren’t particularly compelling to scroll to.

AFTER

Collapsed nav into top level categories with dropdowns, clearer link color, search bar moved into navigation. Shorter background stating the value prop (still love this beautiful image) and then jump right into content which is much higher above the fold now.

About Page Improvements

I forgot to take a before shot, which makes this a bit less exciting, but the about section was one of the most neglected on our website. It is funny to read over what has been written as the business continues to evolve and I updated this to talk a lot more about our awesome contributor community.

So that’s it, what do you think? Any suggestions for further improvements or are you missing something I took away? Let me know in the comments.