Website Usability means to design a website with the visitors in mind from the outset. In today’s world of web design, web designers have to take a lot of considerations into account when designing a web-site, the main being usability.
Website Usability is all about the visitors’ experience when they visit and use your website. When designing a website, the designer should base the whole design and implementation around website usability. A lot of design agencies design web-sites to be very graphical, showing lifestyle shots and not a great deal of text based information and fact. Potential customers are searching the internet for information, not for images. The look and feel of a web-site along side quality text content is very important in website design.
Successful website usability is the presentation of information on the page, with a professional design that will engage with the visitor and leave them with a lasting impression, or even better, persuading them to contact or purchase from you.
Good web-site usability practice doesn’t mean you should exclude dynamic content such as flash or images, it is simply important to make it relevant to the information contained on the page.
Essentially you want to make it easy for them to do what they want to do on your website and find the information, facts or prices that they need. Enhancing the website usability means that you are maximizing your presence on the internet.
Some of the factors of Website usability include:
1. Simple Navigation between pages.
2. Engaging, Clear and well written text.
3. Appropriate images that don’t overwhelm the page.
4. Easy to find contact information.
5. Easy to use contact / feedback forms.
6. Consistent design and style throughout the web-site design.
In experienced hands, HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) combined with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) allows complete freedom to achieve website usability.
Technically the process of website designing can be quite difficult. While designing a website, a designer should keep in mind that not every visitor will view the website in the same circumstances. The display of the page may change according to the browser, monitor size, and display settings.
Designing your web-site in HTML and CSS, and following W3C guidelines, can help reduce the difference in the appearance of your web-site across different platforms.
In my experience, a user friendly web-site has a professional, clean design accompanied with informative text that is well written for humans and not search engines.
Flash and other animations do make a nice feature on web-sites, providing they don’t overwhelm the rest of the page or the design.
All web designers should take web-site usability into account before starting with a design on the computer.
By
Web Designers - Creare
