Do you want a user-friendly website?
As more and more people turn to the internet as their primary source of information, maintaining a successful website makes good business sense. A good website can help you attract potential customers, convert potential customers into purchasing customers, improve your targeting to specific audiences, and continue to develop the reputation of your brand for consistently delivering high-quality products. An essential part of maintaining a successful website is designing a user friendly website.
Whether or not your business is strictly online, strictly brick-and-mortar, or a combination of the two, for many potential customers your website will be the face of your business. This means you want to design your website as intuitively as possible so your customers can access the information they need.
The following tips for a user-friendly website are a good place to start.
Utilize Careful Placement
In important but often overlooked part of creating a user-friendly website is not just what you place on your site but where you place it. The most important parts of your website should be place above the fold. The above the fold section of a page is what the user sees first. If you don’t place your strongest content there, there is a big chance that the visitor will click off your site and move on to your competition.
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80% of text is read above the fold.
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Users in the West start reading on the top left of any page. As they spend more time on your site, they are more focused on the left side. According to Jacob Nielsen, users spend 69% of their time on the left side of web pages.
White Space is Your Friend
White space sometimes, wrongly, called negative space. Nothing could be farther from the truth. White space is your friend. It makes skimming, which is what people want, of your website easier. White space is not wasted real estate. Because it reduces the amount text the user sees at once, white space helps with the scannability of your website. Too much clutter is hard on the eyes and frustrates users. White space also helps to make your website more professional.
Be Mobile Compatible
One of the biggest trends in online marketing is the rise of mobile users. An ever-growing number of people are using smart phones to browse the internet and they are coming to expect that their favorite websites have mobile compatibility. On top of this, some of the major search engines like Google are writing mobile compatibility into their algorithms. Search engine algorithms are the means that search engines use to rank content on the web. The higher your ranking, the more people will find your webpage. As search engines like Google are prioritizing mobile compatibility, you should, too, in order to remain relevant.
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Do you want a user-friendly website? Contact us now.
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Make Your Interface Intuitive
Think of your website in the same way you think of your place of business. You want to design your website, just like you want to design your place of business, in a way that encourages potential customers to become purchasing customers. The best part about designing a website is that you are free from the types of pre-existing physical constraints that come with a place of business. You can design a website exactly how you want it. Another way to think about your website design is to think about how you want to present your information in as persuasive a way as possible. Present your customers with the most important information, first. Make your contact information obvious. Make it clear on the very first page exactly what kind of services you offer.
Quick Load Times
As internet technology progresses, people have come to expect faster and faster load times on the internet. Load time refers to the amount of time it takes for a website to appear after you have clicked on it. A good rule of thumb for a user friendly website is your website should load in four to six seconds if not faster. There are many factors that affect load times like third party plug-ins, widgets, and the complexity of your graphics and media files. Balancing the desired physical appearance of your website against convenience factors like load times are an important consideration.
Here is how to increase the speed of your website:
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- Install a caching plugin. WP Super Cache is a great free plugin I recommend.
- Use a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN is a collection of web servers in multiple physical locations that enable quick content delivery to users. MaxCDN, CacheFly, and Cloudflare are a few popular CDNs.
- Host your static files such as CSS files, images, javascript, podcasts and pdf files in the cloud that uses a CDN.
- Optimize your images. Reduce the size of your photos, images, and infographics.
- Uninstall all the plugins that you are not using. Many WordPress sites have too many plugins that are not used.
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Clear Content
This may sound simple, but it is often overlooked: Clear, concise messaging is essential for a successful website. One of the first ways your customers will learn about your business is by reading your content. Make sure the writing is professional, free from grammatical errors, gets to the point, and communicates precisely what you need it to.
Ask the following questions to test the user-friendliness of your website:
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- Is your website easy to scan?
- Can users easily navigate your site?
- Does your website look professional?
- Is there enough white space?
- Can visitors easily accomplish what they want to do on your website?
- Is your contact information easy to find?
- Does your website return any error messages?
- Does your website work well on mobile devices?
- Have you tested your site on the most popular web browsers?
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Do you want help with your website? Contact us now.
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photo credit: Fresh Air – 23/365
photo credit: Trying to Reach you… as Fast as I can