When developing a new website, site design and usability should be one of the highest priorities on your development list. Without a usable design, users will quickly become frustrated with your website and will stop visiting. Thankfully, there are a few basic usability practices that you can employ to help make your visitors’ experiences the best they can be.

1. Use different colors. Color design on your website should not be garish or unprofessional, but you can utilize different colors to help draw attention to various portions of your website. If, for example, you wish to emphasize certain points in your content, then a bold red or blue color will draw a visitor’s eye directly to that portion of the site. You can also draw attention to other portions of your website, such as your navigation bar or certain pages that you want to attract more attention. Be cautious of over-using colors, though, since a proliferation of different, non-complementary colors on a website is a surefire way to drive people away from your site.
2. Focus your design on the objective. The design of a website should always focus on the end goal of the site. If the site is designed to inform people, then the focus should be predominately on content and ease of navigation. If your goal is to sell a product, then focusing a design around product displays and easy product searches should be your goal. In focusing on your goal, you can use colors and design patterns that help draw the attention of the customer to certain portions of the website. You can also make things like checking out easy, which will reduce the chances that they will become frustrated with the site and leave before making a purchase. Regardless of the goal, designing your site and marketing it with certain features being in dominance will help stimulate traffic throughput, and is likely to increase your overall return on investment (ROI).
3. Use a consistent formatting scheme. There are few things worse than a website whose formatting and design is inconsistent from page to page. This type of haphazard design and layout smacks of unprofessionalism, and is a big turn-off to visitors. Even if your website consists of only one or two pages, use a consistent design across them. If you have different sections of your web site that require differing designs, link them with some common theme, like a header that remains the same, or a sidebar that doesn’t change. If you can make transitions between designs on your website nonexistent or as smooth as possible, then your internet visitors will feel less jolted during their time on your website.
4. Have simple buttons and links. Long links and large, flashing buttons can be difficult on the eyes and makes it difficult for people on a website to navigate around to different pages. Oversized, flashing, oddly colored and unnaturally placed buttons distract from your content and keep visitors away from your website. To avoid this, design your buttons with simplicity in mind, and steer away from ones that are unconventional. Oversized links that join multiple words in a sentence are also distracting, and it can be difficult for a user to tell if the collection of words is one link, or multiple links all next to each other. Instead of creating links that span multiple words, just use one word, or two at most. The users of your website will then be able to enjoy the content you have created without getting distracted by annoying underlining and linking.
5. Provide a sitemap. A sitemap, while sometimes thought of as outdated, is extremely helpful, especially for larger sites. New visitors to your site will benefit from a sitemap, since it will provide them with an easy way to view all of the pages and sections of your site. If a new visitor comes to your website from the internet, then having a sitemap to direct them to the page they want to go will be a huge help from a usability standpoint. It will also provide repeat visitors with a way to stay up to date on new parts of your website, and will let them find pages on it that they haven’t seen before.
6. Make all sections of the site easy to access. Above all, make sure that your site is easy to access, both for novices and experts. Don’t make links confusing, and avoid any unnecessary obfuscation. If you want to keep people out of a certain part of your website, then either don’t put it up on the internet, or use a password system to protect it. You should also have links on all of your pages that remain consistent in a place like a header, footer or sidebar. These links should go to main pages on your website, such as the homepage, a contact page or other important pages. This reliable set of links will make navigation and accessibility each for users, and will encourage first-time visitors to come back again and again.

Creating a website with good usability traits can be difficult, but the rewards are well worth it. Increased traffic, a higher ROI and more success from your marketing campaigns will all result from your initial hard work in putting the site together. By following these few usability tips, you can make this process much easier.

This entry was posted by emorgan on Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 at 12:56 pm and is filed under Marketing, SEO, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.