Web Usability

Overview

Web usability involves creating and designing your website in such a way that it is user-friendly. A visitor to your site should be able to understand and navigate a website easily. Web usability efforts simplify how a person can find desired information by direct search. Web usability efforts help visitors discover new information and products by browsing. Information should be easy to access and straightforward. A user should be able to comprehend information, order products, and download information easily.

If you know what techniques to make your website usable, you can save a lot of money that you would otherwise spend on web developers. A fully customized website costs around $199 to $500 depending on the package that you select.

Benefits

Web usability adds quality to web applications. Since your website is easy to access and navigate, you can attract more visitors. This leads to proportional rise in your sales and web rankings. Simple language, clear text labels, and using straightforward words can increase your website traffic. Improved usability also reduces the amount of time spent on developing your website.

How It Works

If you want to improve the usability of your website, you should concentrate on three main areas: page design, site design, and website development. When you design the layout of the website, stick to simple themes that are clear and easy to navigate. Preferably place the navigation tab in the same space in all the web pages of your website. Place internal links that make it easy to navigate from one web page to another. When such internal links are placed, preferably design them in such a way that the selected pages open in a new tab. Optimize the images in your website and avoid adding unnecessary graphics and images that could clutter up the page.

Pay detailed attention to the content in every webpage. Users generally scan headlines and topics till they find something interesting. To increase web usability, make these topics interesting and catchy. All the information in a web page should be arranged in a specific order. Information can be given in bold letters and bullets to capture the attention of the visitor.

Use proper Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML) and Extensible Hyper Text Markup Language (XHTML) codes for all the elements in the web page. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) can be used reduce download times for page layouts and navigation.