Navigation

Logically build navigation is essential to avoid that your site’s visitor get lost and give up on continue reading your site. With the lack of optimised navigation you can loose potential customers to your competitiors.

You can include home button in the navigation or back to the top link at the end of the page, the relevant category link on the sidebar, related pages link at the bottom of your page, breadcrumbs, clear where you are links etc. to make it easy and logical to your visitors to get from “A” to “B”. Don’t forget, not all your visitors will enter your site from the home page. It’s more likely that the starting point will be an article or a subpage introducing your services – you should guide them to reach the important contents from all the possible pages.

Don’t waste other’s time

Be clear and simple. Most users have limited time to get to the important information, you should consider if your links or content is hidden or hard to reach most likely your visitors won’t take the time to look for it. What may seem selfexplanatory for you it may not be simple for others to figure out.

Avoid Cluttering Elements

You might think it’s a good idea to put your favorite song in the background or automatically starting video cast, you are not on the right track in terms of usability. If it is your personal web designer and you don’t consider usability issues – well, it is up to you. But any other case give your visitors the chance to choose if they are really interested to watch that video, download that plugin or listen to that audio file. For some pleople (including myself) nothing is more irritating than arriving to a website where there is no clear guide what to do next or how to stop some annoying animation or advertisement.

Include Tag-lines

Statistics show that a website has 8 seconds to capture visitor’s attention before they leave the actual page. With a clear tagline you could help to sumerize what is your site’s main focal point.

Include Site search

Especially if you have an extensive content on your website, you can help your visitor to get to the important data by implementing a site search. Consider some main rules for the search box: make it 27 character wide, place it on top of the page and include a clear search button.

Graphics

Use it wisely, it should add some extra meaning to your website. Avoid using generic images which just take up the space and doesn’t have any value in terms of usability. Don’t forget that sometimes less is more.

New Technologies

There are always some very attractive solutions what the modern web browsers are capable of handling. You should always consider the fact that your visitor might use an older web browser or visit your website on a smartphone. Inlcude degradation, special style sheets for different media, fall backs for these cases. Test your site on different browsers and devices to make sure it will be usable for everyone.