Making a successful blog or website is not an easy task. In addition to the good content, there is one more factor which plays an important role in the success of your website and that factor is Usability. Your visitors will come back to your website only if it is user friendly so that they can easily find the information they are looking for. No one wants to visit the website where content is hard to read or where visitors have to wait for site to get loaded. In this article we’ll highlight the most important things you should definitely do to improve the usability of your website.
Reduce Loading Time – Nobody wants to wait for a site to get loaded. So if your website takes a lot of time to load then you are definitely losing a lot of your visitors. Make sure that your website is light and easy to load even on dial-up connections. Avoid using of flash, heavy images, pop-ups and other obtrusive elements on your website.
Use user friendly urls – Nothing makes the site uglier than the long dynamic urls filled with strings and numbers. There urls are not good for search engines and users. So, make sure that you are not using the default and ugly urls structure for your website. Keep them short, easy to remember and filled with keywords.
Use Proper color scheme – View your website from the viewpoint of your users. Don’t fill your website with bright colors when you are selling walking canes and most of your audience is more than 80 years. In a similar way, don’t use the boring black and white color scheme if your website targets kids and teenagers. Try to think about the emotions your users might be going through while visiting your website and then go with the appropriate color scheme.
Provide multiple ways of communication – Provide your users with as many ways to contact you as possible. The more will be the number of ways for your user to contact you, the more will be your visibility amongst your target audience. Link to your social media profiles from your website where users can contact you beside the traditional contact form.
Avoid auto-playing of music and videos – Nothing annoys a user more when a video starts playing of its own when they open a website. It may interfere with music they might be listening or they might be at their office, library or any other place where they may have to face embarrassment. The first thing which visitors do when they find themselves in such situation is to search a stop button and if they can’t find it quickly they will close the website. The other main issue with auto-playing videos is that they takes a lot of time in loading on slow connection which ruins the overall experience of the user. So it is better to avoid auto-playing. Put your video with a play button and leave the final decision to the users if they are interested in watching it or not.