Tips to improve website usability

Usability is an intensive topic in the web development community. As web developers, we must look toward making the user experience better for everyone and apply these tips as what we hope will become standards, one day adopted by most.

In this article, I outline some of the basic ways to improve usability within your website.

1. Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs have always been a way to improve website usability.

It gives readers the option to access content related to the article and shows them which section of the website they are viewing. Normally, breadcrumbs are structured to give hypertext links to the homepage and category of the article.

2. Larger Font

I recently may changes to my website, these changes include a larger font on content pages. I believe it gives the page a better look and helps visitors’ easily read content. You have to think about your audience when you make design changes.

A font-size of 9px will not cut it.

3. Search Functions

Allowing readers to search content is a must. You may not find much use for it in the beginning of your website, but as you build hundreds of web pages it will be a pain for users to find content without archives or search abilities.

4. Load Times

Optimize, Optimize, Optimize…! You must take the time to optimize your images, CSS, HTML, and JavaScript. By optimizing it helps users access content faster and reduces your bandwidth usage monthly.

5. Browser Compatibility

Always make sure your website is compatibility in all the major browsers, if you do not, then you will lose a large percent of your audience.

6. Be Consistent

Keep design, writing style, and anything else consistent throughout the website. When users first reach a website they tend to scan the page to determine how to achieve the action they desire, by changing elements throughout it can easily confuse them.

7. Include Obvious Contact Information

Your visitors will have numerous reasons for contacting you, which is why it’s important to include obvious contact information on your website. Currently, I include mine on the top of the page within the summary.

8. Be Brief

When writing for the Internet, you should always keep it simple. Studies have shown users only scan content, not reading it thoroughly (word-by-word). Knowing that, you must break content up, make use of hooks to gain attention, and write content in list form when appropriate.

9. Straight Forward Navigation

Keep your navigate structure as simple as possible. Place links in your footer that don’t involve content or required actions from users.

10. Call to Action

If you intent to push products, then you should have some kind of call to action. This has been a technique used by marketers for years.

11. Eliminate doorway and splash pages

Not only are these things a huge design mistake, they’re just plain annoying. If users want to gain access content, show them it, not a splash page.

12. Keep it Simple

I planned for this website to drive home that point, design doesn’t matter, content does. Giving readers consistent pages with rich content is more important than if you created the best looking website in the world.