There are a lot of websites out there that really stink. They are just plain bad. It is easy to get personal about our websites and lose perspective. Maybe we built it ourselves or had our nephew do it for his high school project.
Have you asked whether your web site is usable or had anyone give you honest feedback about it? There is a time to de-personalize it and get serious about how our website comes across. Web development companies – if they are allowed to be honest – can provide clear feedback, when it’s hard to trust our mothers or friends to be open minded.
When someone opens your site, can they find what they’re looking for? Do they understand immediately what your site is all about? All sites are different but the best sites follow “accepted web practices”. If yours doesn’t fit the pattern, people are more likely to leave out of frustration.
Here are a few suggestions to make your site more usable, adapted from Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox article from www.useit.com:
- Place your name and logo on every page and make the logo a link to the home page
- Include a footer on each page with business contact details
- Provide a search function if your site has more than 100 pages
- Use straightforward headlines and page titles to accurately identify the page
- Use grouping and subheadings to structure the page for easy scanning
- Avoid cramming everything about a product or topic into a single, long page
- Product thumbnail photos are useful, but reduce the thumbnail and other images for quick load times. For example, don’t use the original re-sized image for a thumbnail. Zoom in on the most relevant detail and use a combination of cropping and resizing to create a unique quick-loading thumbnail image.
It’s a good idea to spend some time visiting other websites to get ideas and compare. When it comes to your website be sure to entrust it to the right people or you might be showing the world a real stinker.
