One of the most essential factors in web design is usability. It is an important driving component that can keep people coming back to our website. There are some key points that we need to consider to increase the usability of our website. As an example, we should know what people are looking for and whether we are able to give them what they need. In this case, visitors mean business and they are looking for specific information. They will stay in our website as long as it keeps on giving what they want and need. That’s the reason why we need to provide relevant information about our specific topics.
We should have means to find out primary keywords that people need. We should know about the purpose of visiting a website. We need to tell our visitors what the website is all about. Many websites are completely crammed with information with no particular order. This could make it harder for us to figure out about the website is all about. Our website should be given specific information, especially what it can offer to consumers on an instant basis. Relevant information should be placed directly on the homepage and we could promise on things that we could deliver on other pages.
There should be also site-wide link structure and it should help us to gain easy navigation to any webpage inside the website. This will reduce the time needed for people to consume pages. Our design should be able to deliver instant access. This link structure should also allow search engine robots to cache our pages quickly. Some websites effectively put site-wide structure on the footer of the website. Sitemap is an essential component of any good website. It is essentially the skeletal overview of our website structure. This could help us to achieve more efficient browsing experience.
In order to improve usability, we should make sure that the website can be loaded quickly. No one would like to visit a website that takes forever to load. We should be aware that visitors are taking their decisions in seconds and it easy for them to tap the Back button on the mobile devices. Even on high-speed Internet connection, it is possible that our website still loads slowly, due to presence of many elements and complicated on-server codes. We should continuously asses our website for long loading times, such as big ad banners, Java applets and other large graphical elements.
Although Flash-based programs, animation and navigation are considered as outdated; many websites are still using them. Some websites could also use tables inappropriately. Information on a single page shouldn’t be more than 250kB, including text, images and supporting codes. Often, we don’t need to add any kind of animation and sound to our website. Many successful websites are able to offer streamlined presence with only text, graphics and minimal codes. Success can be achieved if we could deliver good presence with simpler configuration.