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Make Your Website User Friendly

Guest post by: David Flannery

Article Overview: 4 tactics to make your website more user friendly for your customers

Make Your Website User Friendly

I want to share with you some tactics and concepts that will make your homepage and website user friendly for the people that visit it.

1. Don't confuse them: For that matter, don't even make them have to think. If a customer or prospect has to put a lot of brainpower into figuring out how to use you homepage or website.... they will leave and find one that doesn't make them think as hard. In today fast paced society people want solutions fast and with as little hassle on their part as possible. Some of the more common things that will cause your customers to have to think are, business jargon, bad fonts, bad inter-site navigation, bad site design such as click-able buttons that don't look click-able etc. As you cannot sit beside every visitor that lands on your site and explain to them first hand how to use your website , you must make everything as self explanatory as possible.

2. Design your homepage and website according to the real way your customers will use it:

When designing a website most business owners will believe that people will pore over and read every word on their site and spend time weighting up their options for their next move. Nothing could be farther from the truth. What the people who land on your site actually do is glance at each new page and scan some of the text on it and click on the first link that catches their attention or looks either vaguely interesting or vaguely connected to what they are looking for. Get used to the fact the average person that lands on your website will not read 90% of the text on any given page of your site. They scan your website in the same manner as they scan a roadside billboard advert as they drive past it at 60mph. When designing or re-designing your website keep the following facts in mind: People will not read your website they will scan it, they will not spend time figuring out how to use your website, they will either just muddle through or leave.

So faced with the fact that the visitors to your website are in a hurry and probably under some sort of pressure, be it time pressure or otherwise, what can you do in order to get your message across fast?...read on!

3. You must create a clear visual set-up

The best way to make a web page easy to understand is to make sure that the appearance of the things on that page clearly define the relationships of everything on the page. Make sure that the more important things are the most prominent and stand out and make sure the issues that are related logically are also connected visually.

4. Use Conventional setups

When looking at a medium that imparts knowledge there are certain conventions that everyone is aware of. For example a sentence in large bold type is always a headline, while the smaller text below it will expand on the headline and tell the story and the small type under a photo will always be giving information about that photos even what photographer took the photo.

There are two things you need to know about conventional set-ups, firstly they are useful because they need no explanation, everybody knows them and what they do, so by using them you don't have to educate the people who visit your site and they don't have to think about how to use it. Secondly, using conventional set-ups in your site gives your visitors a reassuring sense of familiarity.

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Article Tags: user friendly, website



Related Forum Posts
Re: How can I promote my site? - There are various useful techniques for promoting a website. In SEO the techniques could be "white hat" and "black hat" techniques. White hat techniques includes following techniques to promote website as per the search engine rules. - Search Engine Friendly Tags - Website submission to Search Engines - Website Submission to Social Sites (Like twitter, Facebook) - Articles Promotion & Press Release Promotion - Quality Directories promotion - Contribution to Blogs, Forums Black hat techniques can reduce website strength in the search engine and can treat site as spam that could be following. - Keywords Stuffing. - Hidden Links - Maximum Links of unknown sites.
Re: make real an idea - Hi.. Make sure your website is working for you! There are many Website Statistics easy-to-use and affordable web traffic analysis service that allows you to monitor your web site traffic. Use this information to your advantage, and improve the design and efficiency of your web site. You just go ahead..i'm there with you.. Good luck..!
Re: Quote of the Day - "The only people witho - Thanks for sharing this Evan, there are some very powerful quotes in there, I particularly like this one:- You are now at a crossroads. This is your opportunity to make the most important decision you will ever make. Forget your past. Who are you now? Who have you decided you really are now? Don't think about who you have been. Who are you now? Who have you decided to become? Make this decision consciously. Make it carefully. Make it powerfully. regards, Mal.
Re: what position to request? - Hi Michael, Great suggestion from David, or you could try something around a design consultancy, How about Website Design Consultant, Design and Development Manager, Website Support and Development Manager or maybe Internet Business Development Consultant. Ultimately whatever you are comfortable with and good luck for the future, Mal.
Not Worst book. Worst Books! - Just as their lots of great business books out there, so are there lots of bad books. I recently checked [i:2dqprtes]The Big Red Fez: How To Make Any Website Better[/i:2dqprtes], out of my local library. It's a slender book, 109 pages. On the left hand side of each page is a snapshot of a webpage, on the right hand size the author (Seth Godin) critiques it, telling what is wrong with it. But, he doesn't show us *his* version of how he'd change that page to make it better. Yes, some of the errors made have self-evident fixes, but the majority of 'em are stuff I wish he would have expanded on to show how, visually - it should have been done. It's easy to pick holes in other people's work, it's a lot harder to then put your own work on view for people to critique!


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