Edited to add: The buttons displayed in this post have changed, due to issues raised in the comments.
When your customers are not the technically sharpest knives in the drawer, sometimes I think a little redundancy can be a good thing. Working from Oliver’s quite helpful comment on my download page redesign I decided to make some adjustments to my buttons.
My old Download Free Trial buttons:
My new buttons:
What has changed? Well, the buttons are actually the same size now (did you catch that? Eight pixels is hard to see!), I have gone to freaky lengths to make sure the common text is in the exact same places* (took about an hour of per-pixel adjustments… grrrr, it would be better to have layers in the icon editor), and I’ve added some explanatory text to make it absolutely obvious to everyone that the image is, indeed, a button. The little embossed cursor was a little finishing touch. I guarantee you 25% of the clicks on the button will hit the cursor.
- Edit to add: back to the drawing board. I didn’t realize I had flopped this up until I saw them laid out vertically.
**Edit the second: Fixed, by taking three constituent images in Axialis, exporting them as GIFs, and using layers in Paint.NET to compose them by hand. That was overkill but it saved quite a bit of time since I was using a hammer to drive a nail rather than a screwdriver — when you need images to line up perfectly, you need layers. Sorry, I sometimes get tunnel vision for little details.
