Website Design Tips and Tricks
Websites that don’t function well and are difficult to navigate make it tough for users to make a purchase or find out what they need. Frequently it is hard to figure out what action to perform with the information provided on a site. It is vital to provide your audience with an indication of the type of ‘action’, if any, you prefer them to make.
As long as the link directing viewers to your purchase page is hard to find, you won’t sell very much. User-friendliness is key when it comes to designing a website — be sure it is simple to understand and easily navigable, with plainly marked links and tabs.
If something detracts from the viewer’s ability to focus, it is bound to deter any action on their part. You want to minimize the amount of pages required to navigate from the starting point to the actual sale transaction point.
Users should be able to easily and intuitively make their way through hyperlinks and navigation. Clearly separate the navigation area from the page’s main content. A user should be able to find what they are looking for on the website with no more than three clicks. Ask a number of people to perform a series of tasks on the site and to provide you with feedback about how easily they were able to understand and navigate and whether they experienced any difficulties while doing so. You can then use their feedback to perform any needed fine-tuning.
A typical issue for a number of online sites is design or style vs. content. As an example, Flash. If Flash is used too much, it will cause pages to load slower, making it boring for the user. Even more significantly, an excess of distracting material can take away from your message. Your website’s design ought to improve on and highlight your intended message rather than serve as a distraction. Graphics, animated effects, video clips, and the like have their place within websites, yet without sacrificing the main message.
And make sure you don’t repeat the mistake of many other website owners by constructing an attractive, informative website and then forgetting it. A lot of the information you uploaded will be outdated in less than half a year. There is a vast multitude of web sites out there that are out of date, and the user that clicks through one of them is probably going to be disappointed, and not very likely to visit that site again.
Be sure your site is validated. If your site doesn’t pass validation, browsers will use various guessing algorithms to work around the bad HTML and CSS, often to your detriment. Be sure to test your site in every common browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, SeaMonkey, Safari) so that you know what it looks like to most of your visitors.
Ease of Access. Make your content easy to understand for a large number of users. Place links to your main content immediately below your site’s header image so that those using screen readers can jump straight to what they’re looking for without having to listen to the navigation on every page. Don’t forget to test your site to ensure that colorblind people can easily use it.
