Aug 04 2008
How To Improve Website Usability
You can build a nice and very good looking website, but if the visitors will have problem reaching your website’s pages, then your website is not useful for them and they might leave and not coming back. This doesn’t mean you have to have a poor looking website. Most of the times a simple website design can be the most liked one. Here are some tips how to improve website usability to ensure it serves its functions optimally.
First, make sure that your website content’s typography is suitable. Don’t use large blocks of text it will be harder to read, use instead more smaller paragraphs. You can always use CSS to make suitable distances between paragraphs. If the length of a line in a paragraph is very high make sure you properly increase the line-height of each line too. In this case your overall text will have an “air-look”.
Also, improve the website readability by making sure that the font size of your paragraph text is big enough, so every aged visitor can easily read it. Don’t forget that there are people who cannot see very well. For example: some sites are using 10-pixel-height text using Arial or Tahoma font. This may look neat and tidy, but some people may have problem reading it, some not be able to read it at all. For websites if the design requires simple font types like Verdana I am usually using 11-13 pixel height fonts and if it requires serif font types like Georgia then a 12-14 pixel height would be the choice. For main titles (H1) I am using 15-23 pixel fonts, for subtitles (H2, H3) 13-15 pixel ones.
Improve your website usability by making your website content reachable for new visitors and returning visitors. When you have lots of articles or pages make sure you have offered certain ways for visitors to can find the information they want. Organize them into categories, subcategories, label them, use different colors, give simple or advanced search possibility to visitors, create a glossary from articles with quick links or make sitemaps.
Be sure that you not overload the important pages of your website such as the main page, or category pages. A website can be easily overloaded with different big images, flash banners, loads of texts, different boxes, interactive plugins and so on. Every of these increase the download size of your page so having a bad website usability you can loose important visitors. Most internet users will leave a website if the page they requested doesn’t load within 15 second. Make sure that your important pages are small enough in kilobytes and they load fast, so you can retain your visitor’s attention.
Test each and every link on your site before you put it online. Use a test server, another directory or simply use a subdomain for it. There is nothing worse for a website usability than broken links, which makes your visitors go away not being able to find what they looking for, so be very careful about that. However after putting a website online there will be always moments when you add to your website more and more pages with lots of links, so using a tool (Google Webmaster Tool) which monitorize your inside and outside links is always useful.
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