2 Comments Written by Andrew Bonar on October 27, 2008 – 10:40 pm

Your website is your corporate headquarters online. Whether you give the impression of the internet of a home-office or state of the art city business is up to you. By practicing good design you will maximize the users impression of your organization and products. By adhering to principles you can ensure your website is as accessible to as many people as possible. This is simply good business sense.

A fantastic, flash based website, with cutting edge graphics and utilizing a heap of bleeding edge technology,  is useless as a sales or marketing vehicle if users cannot easily access the content. As always, I have said it before but I will repeat it because its the golden rule: design your website with the user in mind.

So how to optimize your sites usability? Here are some tips to improve the usability of your website to ensure it serves its functions optimally.

Navigation

Keep it consistent across your site - do not be changing where on the page your site navigation is located. Make sure it is clear, uncluttered and easy to use. This is pivotal to a good user experience.

Page Layout

Place your company logo at the top of your page (left, right or center) and link it to your homepage.
Ensure your navigation area is clear. Most sites have important navigation running across the top of the site, or in a table on the left hand page of a website. Unless you have extremely good reasons provide navigation in one of these areas. It keeps things simple for your users.

Also, If you have a large site, make use of ‘breadcrumbs’.

Typography

This is covered in my first article covering “Web design mistakes” where I tell you not to use excessively small or large fonts. Another thing to consider is your use of fonts, remember that you must limit yourself to what your users have on their computer. Their is no reliable method of font downloading. The most readable web-safe fonts are Verdana, Georgia and Arial, in that order. Arial is great but becomes hard to read at smaller font sizes. At a later date we can write a complete article on typography, let us know in feedback if your interested.

Use CSS

Some of the reasoning behind this is covered in my code bloat article. A lot can be achieved using just CCS, just check out http://www.csszengarden.com/ as an example.

The biggest benefit of CSS is separating design from content - If you wish to change the look of your entire site, you can do it from one single CSS sheet!

Fast Loading Time

If you are sure most of your users are in North America and using a broadband connection, you can get away with pages heavy on graphics and video. If your an ecommerce site relying on sales in other countries it pays to ensure your site is fast loading. To keep your site lean, mean and fast-loading:

• Use CSS - this cuts down on code-bloat and multiple-nested tables
• XHTML compliant sites - this means the underlying code you use is standard, and will load faster in modern browsers because they will easily understand and quickly compile it into a webpage
• Don’t go too heavy on the graphics - each graphic and image adds additional download time
• Be careful with scripting and Flash - again, all this code must be initialized first before running, increasing load time

Add site search

Make it easy for your visitors to find your sites content. If you have not got the technical know-how then — surprise surprise — Google has a very effective free option. Read more here: http://www.google.com/sitesearch/

As Google states, you “increase visitor satisfaction and loyalty, Increase website conversions and sales and Reduce support costs by enhancing self-service online.”

Web Copy

Keep your pages and paragraphs to a reasonable length. As with design, write for your audience. Large blocks of text tend to put visitors off, and it does not make for easy reading. Users usually scan the content, looking for pointers, headers and small paragraphs. Use visual queues such as headings and bold to improve readability. Also make sure you do not have typo’s, spelling and grammatical errors.

Web Standards

Wherever possible, ensure your website complies to web standards at www.w3.org. It is simply no good having a great looking site in Internet Explorer that simply explodes when you use it in Firefox.

And finally, check for broken links!