Where's the banana?

A nice side effect of not having net access is that I've been reading a ton of business books. One that has particularly stood out is Seth Godin's excellent The Big Red Fez. He describes a situation where (and I may remember this wrongly) a monkey in a big red fez is in an experiment. The monkey needs to navigate a series of rooms, and to get him going the researchers put a banana in each room. So, the first thing the monkey looks for in each room is the banana.

Now, Seth likens this situation to web surfers; the first thing they look for when they land on your page is the banana. Take Google for instance - the banana is right in the middle (it's the search box) which probably goes a long way towards explaining it's dominance of the search market. Seth uses example websites to point out all the things that distract users away from the banana and muddle up your site. Excellent reading, and invaluable advice IMHO. It certainly made me rethink my approach to MLTA, so much so that I have almost completely redesigned the page structure of the site so that you can't miss the banana. Thanks Seth :)