How to Improve Your Website Usability?

By Ajay Prasad

Website has become a necessity for every business; small, medium or big. Up to 95% of your customers may visit your website first before stepping in your location. Thus it is necessary to make sure that your website presents well and builds credibility with your prospects.

Here are some simple steps that would make your website effective and help you convert more prospects to customer:

1. Provide key information about your company on the homepage to help your visitors decide that you are the company they want to do business with. Make sure that your unique value proposition and any offer stands out immediately.
   
   
2. Check to confirm that all pages of your website consistently relate to your unique value proposition well and help paint appropriate picture of your business.
   
   
3. Provide links everywhere in the website (for example, if you say contact us .., always provide the link address right there rather than asking the visitor to go back & forth). Make sure that navigation is easy between pages.
   
   
4. Design your homepage with the skeleton of your entire website linked to individual pages to make it easy for your website visitors understand what information is available on your website, and easily find it.
   
   
5. Ensure that the website loads fast by avoiding a) large graphics, java applets, flash program or ad banners, b) inappropriate use of tables, c) placing too much information on one page, d) use of free or inferior hosting service resulting in slow data transfer, and e) use of bad junk html codes.
   
   
6. Improve site navigation and appeal by using unique XP style icons.
   
   
7. Ensure website content readability by a) proper font size (10 to 12), b) Verdana or Arial fonts, c) breaking long sentences to smaller interesting ones, d) not using static background images, e) proper heading
   
   
8. Test your website before launching to ensure that a) website loads all browsers, b) all links are working, c) there are no website errors, d) there are no grammatical errors, and e) website loads quickly.
   
   
9. Review server log data regularly to understand traffic, downtime, which page(s) is visited most, exit page(s) etc.