When it comes to your website and its design, it is imperative to ensure that your usability is strong in order to drive results. A website that is poorly designed will not convert as well as a website with good design. Further, from a branding perspective visitors who get frustrated and have a tough time navigating your website will not recall your brand in a positive light.
Let’s look at some usability tips that will help you drive results from your website.
1. Push It – If you are selling products and services on your website, it is important to make sure that you have prominent “call to action” buttons and links on each page of your website. If you are looking to drive results, there is no such thing as a soft sell online.
2. Product Descriptions – If it is products you are selling, for best results give each product a specific page (using an organized hierarchy), a specific and detailed product description, and include pictures as well as videos on the same page. These items will give visitors a complete view of the product and reduce their buying hesitancy.
3. Keep it Simple – A visitor should not have to click more than 3 times to get where they want to go on your site. Increasing the number of clicks to get to the desired pages with decrease the amount of traffic to those pages.
4. Speed Delivers – A website that is slow and cumbersome will underperform. Ensure that your website is quick to load and quick to process transactions in order to achieve maximum results.
5. Optimize Your Structure – If you want visitor traffic to flow to specific pages on your website, links to those pages should be in prominent locations on your website. Placing more in-text links to these pages is a start, as is adding top level navigation tabs for each major page.
Following these tips will help to increase the performance of your website. Of course, each site will vary in specific performance, and as such it is important to always track changes you make to your website to see what effect the changes have on performance. Lastly, when it comes to usability, it is important to test your website with a live audience at least once before pushing it live. This will alert you to potential problems with the site that you have missed.
Written by Marco Muzzi
Marco Muzzi is the Marketing Director for AcuityAds Inc., the industry leaders in real time bidding technology.
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Also try conducting real time live user Testing to see what real website users really think while they use your website. You wont believe what can be learned. One great example of a service offering completely automated functional usability testing is http://www.usertesting.com
That’s real Jim because I’ve encounter like that before its really great.
A good looking and fast loading Website Attract more Visitors. And these skills comes only after spending few months in blogging if you are a newbie in coding.
Some good tips there.Thanks for that.
Personally, I like websites that are fast loading and have a nice clean design. I can live without Flash. I rarely have the patience for video come to that.