Everyday we come across many websites and notice minor usability weaknesses which may be making a negative impact on the website’s conversion rates. Website Usability Optimization is an area where ‘Small changes that make a big difference’ holds especially true!

Here are some basic Website Improvement Tips that although extremely simple, will help make your site instantly more user-friendly:

1. Logo placement – Placing the logo on the top left is now almost an industry-standard and majority of your users would be expecting this. Make sure that your company logo is top-left aligned at the top of the page.
2. Active logo – even if your website has a ‘Home’ menu button, it is important that your logo is also linking to your home page. More than 60% of users will click on the logo expecting it to take them to the home page and an active logo means a more intuitive browsing experience for the user.
3. Active images - If your website offers products for sale or if you have any images or icons accompanying a feature on your website (eg. our website has icons next to features such as ‘Request a quote’ or ‘Get our guide’), it’s a good idea to have these linked to the feature it represents, even if there is a ‘More’ or ‘More info’ button below. This can seriously improve the user-friendliness of your website, especially if it is image-rich since we’re naturally drawn to images more than text and majority of users would instinctively click upon the image first.
4. ‘Next’ button – if you are listing parts of the same content on multiple pages (eg. a ‘Next’ button or page numbers), make sure that upon each new page load, the navigation buttons are aligned to the same position on the screen, as the previous one. If you are displaying multiple image via a slide-show, by keeping the height of every image the same, user can press the next button without having to move the cursor, thereby improving your website’s usability factor.
5. Heavy use of Flash – Flash is a useful application that can help imporve the attractiveness of your website and give it some ‘life’. However, the web is inundated with websites which overdo with Flash making the website pages slow to load and difficult for the user to navigate through. Flash also has serious negative implications toward your search engine rankings since there is’nt much content for spiders to index thereby harming your rankings. Keep Flash use to a minimum and only where appropriate.
Stay tuned as we’ll be bringing you Part 2 with more Website Improvement Tips.

If you have a tip or two of your own, we would love to hear them..Tell us via the Comments section and we’ll be sure to give you credit

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 18th, 2009 at 3:29 am and is filed under Website Improvement Tips, Website Usability Testing . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.