Improving Website Usability, Revisited

November 9, 2006 | By Terry Stockdale | In SEO, Search Engine Optimization, Usability, Visitor Experience 

No matter how gorgeous your website design might be, if your visitors have difficulty finding your content, then you will lose those visitors quickly.

Here are some usability tips to improve the design of your website to ensure it serves its functions optimally:

First, check the fonts and typography of your content

If you have large blocks of text, make sure to use CSS to space out the lines accordingly. The longer a single line of text is, the greater the line-height of each line should be.

Make sure the fonts are clean, clear and readable. If the fonts are cute and hard to read, your site visitors will go elsewhere — it’s that simple.

Second, break large paragraphs into smaller paragraphs.

Visitors will skim over your content. If you’ve got long paragraphs, they will often miss your message!

You will often find that breaking the paragraphs into smaller pieces not only makes them more readable, but allows you to focus more effectively on the key words and key thoughts that you want to communicate.

Of course, that also means that your articles should end up more meaningful to the readers and the search engines, too. Instant SEO via short paragraphs…

Your grammar teacher would not like the thought. On the other hand, examine the articles in your favorite newsletter, magazine or news web site.

In the world of today, short, sentence-length paragraphs are the medium of effective communication.

Third, make sure the font size of your text is big enough to read easily

Some sites have 10-pixel-tall text in Verdana font. While that may look neat and tidy, you have to really strain your eyes to read the actual text.

On the other hand, usability studies have shown that visitors actually read smaller fonts more carefully, while they will skim over large fonts to see if there is any “good” content.

Fourth, make it easy for visitors to find content that they want on your site

You may have dozens, hundreds or thousands of articles on your site. If a certain visitor wants to find one single article from that pile, you have to provide a feasible means to enable visitors to do that without hassle.

Whether you use an article index, a menu-driven system, a Google search of your site, or even an SQL-driven database search engine, you need to provide your visitors the ability to locate the content they desire.

Fifth, make sure that your site loads quickly.

Most internet users will leave a website if it doesn’t load completely within 15 seconds, so make sure your information is delivered to the visitors as soon as possible.

Be sure to resize images in your graphics program, not just by setting width and height variables for display of the images. If you resize the images and optimize their quality for the display size, you can dramatically reduce their file size.

Last of all, test each and every link on your site before it goes online

When you add pages or content, check the links. Then, load the pages and check them again — you may find that you were linking to images or files on your hard drive and not on your site!

There is little that creates a worse impression in a potential customer than to find broken links when she is looking for information.

Recommended Resource: Don’t Make Me Think

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