Web Design

There’s a lot to consider when developing a new, or managing an existing website.  There is more to a website than meets the eye.  Read on to find out how web design usability features can help you to win business.

If you’re a website designer, run a website or are perhaps thinking about a website redesign there are some essential usability issues that you should pay close attention to in order to extract every last drop of value out of your project. Some of them might seem a little obvious; others even a little silly.  Rest assured though that when applied together they conspire to deliver a killer website usability experience. It’s all very well being a visual design ninja, but if the user experience is a fail then the site is going nowhere. A solid web design foundation is the guarantee you need to boost visits, site time, click through and conversions.

Easy on the eye

The classic copy content presentation advice is keep it easy on the eye. People skim and scan online. Make reading easy for visitors by heading and subheading your copy using header tags. Short sentences in short paragraphs make consumption of your copy quick and easy. Highlight words and use bullet points to present your ideas succinctly and attractively.

People or machines?

In the choice between people and machines, people win every single time. In their pursuit of top search rankings, web designers and web copywriters are sometimes guilty of writing for the search spiders and algorithms instead of their visitors. Make you copy human, humane and link worthy. That’s your differential – the inbound links you inspire through quality content. Not keywords crammed into a phoney article that exists purely as spider food.

Consistency, consistency, consistency

People know what they like and like what they know. By keeping your page structures consistent you improve the reader experience by stopping them having to climb small but subtly irritating learning curves every time they visit a new page to sample more of your content. Pages should be easy on the eye and ideally structured around a grid design to make the content sit comfortably and allow visitors to intuitively feel their way around the screen.

Browserbility

There’s more than one way to browse a website and though Internet Explorer is the most commonly used browser many people now use Firefox, Safari or Opera. Google’s Chrome is also starting to make rapid advance now so it’s vital that your site looks and functions as it should across a range of different browsers.