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Articles Index >> Marketing
Making Your Website User Friendly
by Michael Cheney
To make your website user friendly, you really need to put yourself in the shoes
of your visitor. When it boils down to it, the only thing people are looking
for on the Internet is information. Every visitor on every website is looking
for information. The quicker that you can get information to them and enable
them to find what it is that they are looking for, the happier they will be
and the longer they will stay on your website.
I’ve always maintained that information is the most important aspect
to the Internet. When I’ve said that people are only looking for information
some have said to me: But what about people that are buying products? They’re
not looking for information, they’re looking for products. This isn’t
true. Let’s look at an example.
Imagine someone wants to buy a car online. Although they are looking to buy
this product on the web, the first thing they are looking for is information.
They are looking for information about the price of the car, the model of the
car and other details to do with the product. So before they actually get to
the point of purchase, they are looking for information.
To make your website user friendly, you need to give people information as
quickly and as easily as possible. Ideally, your website should follow the two-click
or three-click rule. This simply means that you can reach any page on your website
within just two or three clicks.
You need to try and keep all your navigational elements in the same place on
all of your pages. If possible, try to have only one navigation bar, either
on the left or at the top of the page.
Try and adopt a uniform standard for the size of color, the color of font and
the size of font that you use on your website. It’s also very important
to use the same linking color and format throughout your website.
Sometimes you’ll see websites that have different colored links throughout
them. Depending on which page you’re on or what the link is about. This
might seem like a good idea at the time, but having external links that appear
different on different pages will be confusing for your visitors.
You should also try to stick to web standards. There are certain standards
that are developing that aren’t written down anywhere, but people developing
websites are starting to realize that they are becoming the norm.
An example is to have a logo at the top left or top right of your page, throughout
your website, that links back to the homepage. Nobody has written down that
this logo should link to your homepage, and yet more and more users are expecting
this to happen.
Another example is to have a ‘return to top of page’ link. On longer
pages of your site at the bottom of the page, rather than asking people to scroll
upwards to reach the navigation again, you have a simple link that says ‘return
to top.’ When people click on it they are brought back to the top of the
page.
So when you are trying to make your website user friendly, you need to think
of the visitor and remember that every visitor on every website is just looking
for information.
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