Topfield UK recently launched their redesigned web site. It has quite a few major problems and for a new site, scores surprisingly low on the usability scale.

I won’t go into too much detail right now, but here’s the first problem I tripped up on: most of the links on this site have changed and there has been no provision for keeping old links working.

Most of the topfield.co.uk links in the Google index no longer work (at the time of writing, it will get updated at some stage) and to make matters worse, clicking on one of the dead links takes you to a default user-hostile error page (example) with no onward navigation links.

One really important rule of web site redesign is to keep existing links working and if this is not possible, at least have a useful error page with navigation links.

As a result of this oversight, most people clicking on a deep link to topfield.co.uk will hit a dead end error page. Many of these users will not find the site and some may even assume the site is down or Topfield has gone out of business.