Nine Effective Tips for Improving your Website's Usability

Web usability is perhaps the most important factor in any web design. This is the driving factor that keeps your visitors coming back to your website. Given below are a few points that you need to consider to increase your website's usability. Points to consider for improving web usability 1.) Give your visitor what he is looking for A visitor means business; he is looking for information and will stay in your site only as long as he gets what he wants. So provide only relevant information on your homepage that is specific to your end users. Web logs are the best means of finding out which keyword your visitor used and for what purpose he could have visited your website. 2.) Tell your visitor what your site is all about Often websites are crammed with information in no specific order making it hard to figure out what the site is all about! Your site should give information about what it can offer a visitor on an instant basis. You can do this by providing relevant information on the homepage. You can also provide links like `about us' or `about this website' for further clarification. 3.) Provide site wide links Site wide links are very important in any website. They allow easy navigation to all pages and reduce time consumed on browsing the pages. Your user can have instant access to what he is looking for from any webpage using the site wide links. They also allow the search engine robots to cache your pages efficiently. Site wide links can be provided at the bottom of all web-pages. 4.) Provide a sitemap A sitemap is the mark of a good website. Sitemaps give the skeleton of an entire site on a single webpage with all links. As site maps are specifically meant to provide site information they can lead to efficient browsing. 5.) Ensure that your website loads fast No one likes pages that take long time to load. Your website visitor takes decisions in seconds and it won't take him long to press the back button or type another address to access other related websites. So make sure that your site loads fast. The possible reasons for long loading times are a.) Use of large graphics, java applets, flash programs or ad banners b.) Inappropriate use of tables, like placing the entire page under a table c.) Placing too much information (more than 50K) on one page d.) Use of free or inferior hosting services resulting in slow data transfer e.) Use of bad or junk html codes 6.) Improve site's navigation using icons Site navigation is an important aspect of web usability. Making use of unique XP style icons can really make your site appealing at the same time adding to easy navigation. Some businesses that offer XP style icons are