Nobody likes clutter. It’s overwhelming, distracting, and a chore to clean up. No, I’m not talking about your office space — I’m talking about your website. All the clutter people have to sift through to find the information they’re looking for.
Web professionals often see "clutter" as a design problem, but as usability evangelist Jared Spool notes, "It’s not the visual design the users are reacting to. It’s the actual content."
Crappy content is clutter. Quality content is valuable.
The key to solving your cluttered website is to prioritize and serve users useful, relevant content that meets their needs.
Spool offers a good reminder to seek out content clutter. Do all your links and images have purpose? Are they valuable?
Clutter is what happens when we fill a page with things the user doesn’t care about. Replace the useless stuff with links, copy, and content the users really want, and the page suddenly becomes uncluttered.
Source: Clutter by Jared Spool, Nov. 4th, 2011.
Nicely said. Accurate. Simple. Memorable.