How to make sure your website is a success
Online visibility is of paramount importance in this day and age. One problem that comes about time and time again however, is that many businesses focus purely on getting their website high up in Google rankings but overlook some simple, yet enormous flaws in their sites.
There is no denying that SEO and making your site easy to find online is a must have but this is only the first step in attracting new customers. You could pay thousands every year for SEO and be at the top of all Google searches but if your site doesn’t instantly appeal to a potential customer and tell them exactly what they want to know, then they will simply leave and go somewhere else.
Research shows that most users will exit a website within ten seconds if they don’t find what they are after. A study from the NN Group states “the average page visit lasts less than a minute” and that potential customers will only “read a quarter of the text on the pages that they visit”. (www.nngroup.com)
What steps can you take to ensure your website is user friendly?
Firstly your website has to be eye catching. A good, clean and appealing design is more likely to attract a user’s attention and convince them that the text on the page is worth reading. A lot of people, myself included, will leave a site almost instantly if it looks awful as they may assume that the content in the site will be equally as terrible.Secondly, your website needs to inform the user within the first few seconds of what it is that you do. If someone visits your site and isn’t informed that your company can provide the service they are searching for, they will take their business somewhere else.
Thirdly, all the content in your site must be well laid out with a clear, easy to understand menu allowing the user to effortlessly find their way through your website and get to where they want to be. If parts of your website are not categorised correctly or a user finds it difficult to find a certain part of the site, they will often give up and find another website. Also, if a user has to follow link after link after link to end up where they want to be, they may often get bored and try somewhere else. A good rule to work by is to build and organise your website in a way that makes it possible for a user to reach any part of the site in 3 clicks. This allows the user to reach their desired destination with ease and as quickly as possible.
Keep things simple. If something doesn’t need to be there then don’t clutter your site unnecessarily.
There are many other things which will help keep users on your site, one of these is making sure that your website is fast and functions perfectly. This means having no excessively large images that take too long to load, or not including too many pictures on one part of your site as this too will slow down your website. Flash websites are being slowly faded out as many devices, mainly Apple, do not support Flash, meaning your website may not be accessible by everyone. Flash is also bad for SEO and Search rankings as text generated in Flash cannot be read, therefore in the eyes of Google, it doesn’t exist.
So there we have it, a simple run-down of some of the most important website building tips for making a user friendly website. There are of course many other factors that will influence how a user will act when visiting your website however if you make sure you cover the points noted above then you are definitely putting yourself in a good position from the start.
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