Improving Website Usability

No matter how good your website design might be, if it is hard for you to reach your site’s content then your site will be really quite useless. Below are a few tips that will help you to improve on your website’s usability in order to ensure that it serves its functions in an optimal manner.

The first method is to make sure that your site’s content has a suitable topography. If you have large blocks of text, try to make sure to use CSS in order to space out the lines accordingly. The longer a single line of text might be, the greater you should make the line-height of each line. Further, try to make sure that the font size of your text is big enough to be read with ease. Some sites contain a 10-pixel-tall text in Verdana font; although that might look neat and tidy, you will have to really focus your eyes to read the actual text properly.

Try to make it easy for visitors to find the content they need on your site. If you have thousands of articles on your site and a certain visitor wants to find one single article in the pile, you will have to provide a practicable means that will make it possible for visitors to do that without any trouble. Whether it is an SQL-driven database search engine or just a glossary or index of articles that you have, providing such a feature will ensure your visitors can use your site more easily.

If you don’t want to lose visitors, try to make sure that your site loads faster. Most internet users will click away from a website if it doesn't load completely within 15 seconds, so make sure that only the best of your website is delivered to the visitors and as soon as possible, in order to retain their attention.

Lastly, try to test each and every link on your site before it goes online. There is nothing worse and unprofessional than a site with broken links, so make sure you bear it well in mind.

Article Source: http://www.webdesignarticles.net.

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Norman Mather is contributing editor at http://www.webdesignarticles.net/. This article may be reproduced provided that its complete content, links and author byline are kept intact and unchanged. No additional links permitted. Hyperlinks and/or URLs must remain both human clickable and search engine spiderable.