Half Price Books

http://www.halfpricebooks.com/

Intended audience

• Half Price books customers and potential customers
• Potential employees

Usefulness of content

• The content is essential for customers, and includes:
• Store locations and hours of operation
• Store promotions
• Information regarding products
• Information regarding community involvement
• Press releases, company history
• Employment opportunities

Consistency of design

• The main navigation bar across the top is consistent across the various subtopic pages.
• Colors and fonts are consistently used throughout the site. The font size falls toward the smallish side, but is used consistently.
• In addition to the corporate logo, the "Different stores. Different stories." slogan tells you exactly who they are and what they do. They are not Amazon and are not seeking to carry every book on the planet. Rather, Half Price is about finding what you _weren't_ looking for, and the site consistently emphasizes this.

Ease of navigation

• The main navigation bar is easy to find and use. Although there is a lot of information here, it is well organized by topic.
• The site helpfully warns you that you are about to leave it when you attempt to search books or shop online.
• A minor quibble is that clicking on any product takes you to the store locator page. Of course, this is to show you that you need to go to a store to get the product, but it was a little too subtle for me as I was actually expecting product information to appear.
• The design decision to not have a site search function is interesting. The information organization by topic is very good, so it's not really necessary here. Much like the stores themselves, this site is for browsing.