Improve your Site’s Usability
When online entrepreneurs think about their plans for their websites, they often think of almost every detail. From design to affiliate programs and structure, all these are considered before they start coding. However, one aspect of site creation that they often overlook is site usability.
There are several reasons why you should look into your site’s usability. The first reason is that this makes your website conveniently accessible to customers. If your competitor’s website is easier to surf and more user-friendly, then it’s easier for your customer to find what they want in your competitor’s site instead of yours.
Another reason is that improving site usability is advantageous to you as well. You will be able to find what you need on your site, and debugging will definitely be easier.
Checking for usability
When you check your site for usability, the first thing you’re going to want to look at is the text. What you’ll notice about most people is that when they read web text, they do not read it word for word. Oftentimes, people scan through the available text to look for what they need. Make use of headings, paragraph text, ordered lists, and bullet lists. Using bold text also helps communicate to your visitors which parts of the text they should be paying attention to. Modifying your text based on emphasis and making full use of HTML heading and list tags not only help your readers, but these also help search engines crawl your site for relevance.
On a related note, it helps to make your site print-friendly, especially if your site text is informative. Try not to place significant text in jpg or gif files. If this contains information that your visitors will need, then there should be no reason for them to wait several seconds for the images to load.
For your home page to be connected to other pages of the site as well as to other sites, you need to have links. Links are one of the most important features of your website, because this allows your visitors to make choices about which relevant information they want to look at. It is very important that users know exactly which parts of your pages are links. Make this clear to them by giving your links “clickability” by making them different from your regular text. It also helps to take advantage of the “visited links” HTML code, because your site visitors would find it convenient if they knew which pages they’ve already visited.
There are other small features you can add to your site that would allow your users to make the most of what your site has to offer. Adding a search function helps, because this allows your users to find any specific part of your site for their needs. Try to avoid using frames, as this makes some important frames inaccessible because they cannot be bookmarked.
By looking at your website in your visitor’s point of view, you’ll know exactly what you need in order to make it convenient for your customers to come back.
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