Website usability can have a vital effect on your ROI (Return on Investment). When a user visits your website there generally looking directly in to your site navigation bar, and etc. If you don’t have a great navigational structure then your generally your visitors won’t find what there looking for. A similar example would be going into a store, but everything is scattered around and you can’t find what your looking for by that time your probably going to leave. Someone much whether shop at a store where they can find what there looking for, so in other words a very well organized kept store.

Website Usability Tips Below

1. Navigational Structure, always make sure you have your navigation structure laid out very nicely. If at all possible make sure all of your web pages are showing. Think about it you visit a website and your checking out what they have, but where are you looking? You are looking at the navigation bar a big percentage of the time just like when I get phone calls on our services people browse through everything and they ask about certain things and there looking at my navigational bar.
2. Readability, Make sure everything is well written on the website. Which this is still a area I’m improving on which we have an excellent content writer, but she only takes care of client websites. Anyways when you write like a true writer its so much easier to pursued people into buying your product or getting them to call you, plus keep them hooked into the site.
3. Forms, Make sure your forms are easy to use, don’t try to get into too many questions. When you get into too many questions people have the tendency to get lazy and X your website out or move to another the next website.
4. Home Button, Make sure there is a home button through the website, also link your main header / banner to the home page cause believe it or not a lot of people click on that banner with out even realizing it, so they can go back to your home page. Makes things a lot more simple for the beginner user.
5. Loading, Make sure your pages are loading very fast, when the pages load faster the user are more comfortable. They stay more intact, generally people don’t want to mess with somethings thats going to take for ever to load.
6. Design Elements, Make sure the website is very well categorized and the design elements are all laid out appropriately.
7. 404 Page, Something that we actually need to do, but create a 404 page that will show the site navigation. So just encase someone visits your website and the web page is gone they will get a page that will show the sites navigation bar instead of a blank 404 page.
8. Feedback, Pay attention to how your consumers are acting around your website. Are they finding stuff easily, are they getting frustrated with the navigational structure, just try to pay attention to what they say if they ever share this mind set with you.
9. Flash, if your using flash make sure you have a page that will offer just an html version, a classic view. Not every one likes flash and quite honestly I don’t recommended it because a lot of people that are looking for great content and want great stuff there not paying attention the fancy flash it can be very annoying at times, its nice to have ,but I quite honesty don’t recommended it. It kills the search engines, and numerous other things.
10. Large Website or Weblog, do you have a large website or a blog. If so make sure you have a search bar located on every page, and its easy to find. If you have some good content on your website generally people might search your website like its a search engine.
11. Where Am I, Always make sure you have the page identify where the end-user is at. So for example if there on the home page make sure the title says home page, and better yet even a header tag located somewhere on the content section of the page.
12. Text / Font, use text and font htat is very readable for your visitors, don’t have text or font thats hard to read. This will kill your website. I mean people visit your website and then read.
13. Colors, Use colors that are eye catching, but healthy. Don’t use colors and animation thats going to annoy your end-user, they might get fed up and leave.

Which there is several factors for the look, feel, and navigation of your website, but out of all honestly just make sure the usability meets the standards. When someone visits yours website and its not usability friendly then the chances are there going to leave. Believe it or not a lot of these things will effect how the user sees your website, and whether or not they stay.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007 at 10:36 am and is filed under Web Design & Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.