Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Website Usability - your magic stick

Website signifies your online presence. The purpose of placing a website is to get visitors who will be converted to potential customers later. Your website should be so well designed that it can lure visitors. On the other hand, it should be credible and informative enough to hold those customers.

Many designers use several adornments to make your site look beautiful, they even succeed. But your website should not only be pretty it should be informative and professionally designed. Your website should not look like a class assignment or just another practice sheet of a novice designer. Sometimes a well made 'beautiful' site suffers a significant lack of visitors. This is because your site needs to be interactive and technically sound to get maximum visitors.

In this article you can get a brief idea about the accessibility and usability of your site. This article will further discuss how can your website compete and have an existence in this vast web fraternity.

Pretty Much

Don't confuse between the words beautiful and effective. These two words, in web designing, hold different meanings. Your site can look good but fail to get visitors whereas your competitor's simple website will be getting much traffic. While making your site mote appealing you put all the adornments and made it look as beautiful as you can. But appearance is just not everything required to lure visitors. It is just the outer wrapping where the gift is inside. Pretty wrapping can enhance the curiosity and gives momentary pleasure but it's always what's inside that matters.

Usability - the right approach

Understand the need of your website. Unless you have some out of the box need, your site is basically, to provide information about your product/services or company. Hence your site should be easy to use and to navigate. Visitors might not spend a lot of time to know about your site functionality, so you should make your site more user-friendly. Your site usability is important for you to target a large group of target audience. This is to achieve your purpose. Site usability involves several points which are easy accessibility, availability of required information, ease of use and navigation etc. your website should answer all the queries of your visitor.

Right Information

Description of products and services is what your visitor might look for. Once you answer your visitor's questions they might refer to you over and over again. A summary of your product, services or company can prove you authentic and trustworthy. You can give an extra link to your visitor for a detailed description.

Accessibility

Accessibility is the need of the time. Your visitors might not spend a long to learn how to fetch information from your site. So you need to cater them everything giving every detail right under their noses. Your website should be easily accessible. Give every detail description or pertinent link to that information, so that your visitors might find everything under one umbrella.

Simplicity

Avoid ambiguous and complex designs for your logo. A simple logo enhances the beauty and the memorability of the logo. You need to put your logo on letterheads, envelops and other items, if the logo will be complex, people might not make out the design. Elaborated logos are difficult to print. Be natural and simple while deciding your logo. A well designed logo can be used with ease for all purposes.

Navigation

Be consistent in your navigation system. Use proper words to explain your links. Do not make ambiguous statements while comprehending something important. For example, if you are an online store, you should give links showing buy or add to cart in your product catalogue for visitors to navigate directly to order page. It is always wise to have a site map, unless your website has few pages. This gives your visitors a simple route to navigate in your site. Even search engines find it easier to locate pages when you have a site map in your site.



http://www.e2solutions.net/articles/website-design-usability.html