Haven been a webmaster for many years, I am quite versed in most aspects of webmastering such as website development, search engine marketing, and various other tasks required to keep a website online and well ranked. I also know aspects of usability, including the importance of creating user centred website, so you can add awareness of usability issues to my webmasters skills, however when it come to more technical aspects of usability, I bow to the expertise of my good friend Rob Campbell of Best Web Image, a usability specialist.

When Rob praised zappos .com ecommerce website for its user friendliness in a blog on his website, I had to take another look at zappos to analyse how the site was put together to achieve the user friendliness that won praises from Rob in the hope that I can  learn a few tricks of the usability trade that I can apply to the ecommerce shopping cart application I am currently working on.

I have never visited or heard of Zappos before, it is a huge online fashion retail website. The site is well laid out, with the navigation menu at the top of the site leads to various departments such as Clothing, Shoes, Accessories and Brands. The is a huge search form with form filed you can enter the item you are looking for or just click under the search form at popular searches which takes you straight to one of the several popular keywords previous visitors to the site used to find information.

After spending about five minutes at the site, I can see the reason Rob Campbell things highly of Zappos. One or the things that impresses me most about the site does not even have anything to do with usability, its the strong customer centred policy of Zappos; you can return items bought from the site withing 365 days, that is, you can buy items from them and return it within one year of purchase to change or have your money back.