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Website_Usability_ _How_to_Make_Your_Website_User Friendly
| Website Usability - How to Make Your Website User-Friendly
In this article we'll cover some basics of website usability, in
other words, making your website user-friendly. This article in
no way covers everything you should keep in mind prior to
designing your website - there is much more. I have listed five
questions you should initially consider. I will be brief with
each question just to give you a few tips to get you started.
Keep in mind that testing is the most important task and should
be conducted frequently.
a.Do visitors know which page they are viewing?
The best way to ensure your visitors don't get lost on your
website is if you title your pages. Make sure this title is the
title in your navigation area too. On your home page, or the one
that is your "index.html" or "index.htm", you don't have to
title the page "HOME PAGE". It could be titled "About Us" or a
page you want your visitors to see as soon as they open your
website. If your "index.html" page is your "About Us" page, then
put the header/title "About Us" at the top of the page. In other
words, every page should have a heading so that your visitors
will know what page they are currently viewing.
b.Can your visitor easily get to other pages using your
navigational area?
Make sure that if you have 5 main pages in your website, there
are 5 links in your navigation area with the exact titles as the
titles on your pages. With this in mind, don't make your titles
too long. If you have articles on your website, make one link
titled "Articles" in your navigation area. On the "Articles"
page, list your article titles in the body of that particular
page because the article titles will be longer.
c.Does my background color and text color make a good
combination?
You will need to take this into serious consideration. If your
color scheme is unappealing, visitors will leave no matter how
good your subject matter may be. If the combination causes eye
strain or headache, your visitors will leave your website and
may not return. Examples: blue background with red text, lime
green background with yellow text, red background with yellow
text, etc. One other background I would like to mention:
patterned/tiled backgrounds. These can be overwhelming to the
eye. No text will be readable on these types of backgrounds - at
least not without difficulty. If you must have a patterned/tiled
background, make it look like a watermark - full color
patterned/tiled backgrounds will send your visitors away quicker
than ice cream melts on a hot stove.
d.Are my photos too big or do I have too many on a page?
If it takes longer than a few seconds for your webpage to load,
then your images are too big or you have too many on a page. It
is not necessary for a photo to take up the space of an entire
browser window. Too many photos, without a doubt, will slow your
website down to a crawl, even on a high-speed connection. Most
people will leave your website before the images finish
downloading. You can make the images small enough for a
slideshow or create thumbnails so that your visitors can select
which images they want to see. Once your visitors click on the
image to see a larger view, make even that image small enough to
see all the details, but not big enough to slow down your
website. There are quite a few image editors out there to use -
some are even free. I use Macromedia's Fireworks to optimize my
images. They have a tool where I can make my images smaller
without losing clarity.
e.How do I test my pages for errors and user-friendliness?
Have a few other people look at your website. If you dont think
that friends and family will want to hurt your feelings, find a
site with your color scheme; tell them that this website is not
your website, but you would like their opinion on the color
scheme and if it is difficult to read. You can also post your
URL to various forums to ask them for a critique of your
website. If this is your first time testing, you can ask for
feedback so that you can get a variety of comments. Keep a copy
of the answers you get so that in the future you can refer back
to what people have said about certain features. Later on, you
can put together a checklist to go by for every website you
design. I wouldn't use just one checklist to check all websites,
but a checklist would be a good start. Whether you are a
beginner or expert website designer, you will always need to
test multiple times. You have a great deal of choices to check
for errors on your site. I like to use W3C's validators to check
for errors and to bring my websites up to standard.
Making your website user-friendly is one of the best things you
can accomplish for yourself and your visitors. Taking the time
to ensure usability is nothing compared to how many visitors you
will lose if you have a not-so-friendly website. Ensuring
readability, fast downloading, and performing multiple tests
will get you started in the right direction of designing
user-friendly websites. Good Luck! Send me a link if you want me
to critique your website.
About the author:
This article was written by Regina Stevens, owner of Keep It
Simple Websites (http://keepitsimplewebsites.com). If you would
like to send comments, email the name of the article and where
you found the article to articles[@]itjsatlanta.com. Take the
brackets out before sending me an email.
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