How To Make Your Website Usable For Your Visitors

A usable site is the one that would help users achieve a goal such as finding information or buying product. Your website should enable users tom to achieve that goal quickly and make it a pleasurable experience. To make a website usable you need to have good and relevant content that is easy to find, pleasant to read and well designed.

Here is the list of things that usability demands and list of common usability problems that websites face all over the web.

Goodness of Content:

A site with good content is the one that provides products or information that people might be looking for. It is a different issue if that is available against. A good usable site should define clearly all subscription packages offered.

Easy Quick Access:

Good [tag-tec]website navigation[/tag-tec] is very important.If your website has well organized structure and easy navigation, it makes it eaasier for users to find what they need.

People who are looking for information may be inexperienced with internet. So it is important to keep your website as simple as possible.

Moreover, speed of acces is very important. Your website should not take much time to load and this demands minimum of imagery, keeping the image files light and small sized. If your page contains too much text, you can break that into multipages. This would ensure faster loading.

None of your content should be more than 3 clicks away from user wherever he might be. None of your important contents should be more than two clicks from your home page. If you need to organize, you might consider division of the site in subsections.

Well Laid Design

No body likes to visit messy websites.Your website should be well designed with minimum of distractions for the users. You do not require great designing skills, only adherance to simple principles we discussed before.

Identify Problems

You should frequently examine your website for any problems that user might face. Analyzing your web statstics can also help you in identifying the frequently visited pages and pages fro where users leave. After you have identified a problem, next step is to rectify that. Some of the commonly faced usability problems are

• The website appears withou theme and purpose.
• Slow loading site. A user hardly waits for more than 10 seconds. Check if you have too much of Java applets, large images, banner ads or flashy elements on your pages.
• The site has some additional reuirement such as software, script, plug in, media etc. Test your website on all the main browsers with bare minimum additional applications.
• Poor navigation
• Bad design.
• Bad fonts
• Irrelevant content

Remember! More user friendly and usable your site is, higher is the recommendation it would get in search engines and user circle alike. You may use any of other method to improve your website but if it is not usable you will not find enough visitors

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