Making Your Web Site User-Friendly

Contributed by Jay Schroyer

If you take a look at the web sites you frequent, you may start to find a distinctive pattern. Subject material aside, you’ll notice that you enjoy visiting sites that are fast loading, easy to navigate through, and don’t insult you with flashing words and goofy animations. Too many web sites do exactly the opposite of this by completely overdoing it. They’ll post a hundred pictures on their page of products and people. They’ll use outrageous clashing colors with flashing text and poorly animated pieces in the hopes of attracting your attention and possibly your sales. They’ll even go so far as to allow pop-ups to continually pester you as you browse. I wouldn’t even allow a site like this to load.

The last thing you want to do is send potential customers packing, so take a brief moment and review these often overlooked virtues of a user-friendly web site.

Page Size
One of the main reasons people access information on the Internet is convenience. If your site takes too long to load, you will defeat the purpose of people visiting your site. There’s nothing more frustrating than waiting for a page that is simply cluttered with high-resolution graphics and animated objects. If you must have a lot of photos on your page, try reducing their file size. If you don’t know how to reduce graphic file sizes, ask around or check out a computer graphic tutorial that may be able to walk you through it. For web viewing, they don’t have to be the best resolution in the world. If you were printing them, it would be a different story. If there are a lot of pictures and you want to keep high resolution, just provide a list of links and possibly thumbnails so that if people really want to access them, they can choose to access a link that may take a little longer to load instead of being forced to wait for photos to load that they don’t even want to see. You need to think of the lowest common denominator and, in this case, it’s a dial-up user who may have to wait ten or more seconds for your page to load. A good rule of thumb is the simpler, the better.

Spell-Check
Some people are more sensitive and alert to this sort of thing, but there’s also nothing worse than a page full of typos, especially when it’s in the title of the page and completely throws the meaning of the page off. A site that offers “Better Living Through Plastics” would sound pretty silly if it read “Butter Loving Through Plastics.” This is especially important if you are providing prices for items as you don’t want to get into a pricing dispute with a customer. Read it, reread it, and then read it again before you finalize any text within your page. Typos also point towards a lack of credibility. If someone sees a lot of misspellings or incorrect grammar, they may start thinking that the site is a scam of some sort and not a legitimate attempt by you to market your product or services. Use spell-check, grammar check, or print it out and let another pair of eyes take a look at it. A little proofreading could save you a lot of future embarrassment and lost customers.

Broken Links
Visit your own site often as if you were a regular browser and check your links. If you have a link to content that you didn’t provide, you never can be sure when it will just come up missing one day. There is such a feeling of helplessness, disappointment, and defeat when a user clicks on a link that they’ve been arduously searching for and they’re redirected to a web page not found or expired screen. It also gives the impression that you don’t update or monitor your site very often and have allowed it to fall into disrepair.

Design Choices
There’s always a mode of thinking that becomes dominate during web site design and that mode is form over function. Since image is such an important part of any business, people often feel there web site has to be state-of-the-art, avant-garde, and hip. There is a way to find the median between cool and effective. There are studies that take a look at Explorer browser use and determine how people react to colors, sidebars, animation, pop-ups, flashing text, and other staples of web design. These are good guides to follow on your quest to create the ideal web site.

Your layout should be simple and easy to navigate. Always provide a site navigation bar on the side or bottom of the screen so that users can quickly jump to a particular part of your site. Choose your colors wisely and appropriately for ease on the eyes. Use simple fonts and only one or two at the most. You may find a font that you really, really like the look of, but if you have to squint or turn the monitor upside down to read it, it’s probably not a good choice for getting your message across. Avoid ads and banners everywhere. Is this a web site to promote a service or is it a billboard? Avoid clumsy or distracting animation. It makes your web site look juvenile and doesn’t help your credibility. And for heaven’s sake, do not use pop-ups. Most people have a pop-up blocker anyway, so any information you were trying to relate via an annoying pop-up will be quickly smacked down.

Go to the sites that you really enjoy the layout of and take some notes. You may find that a similar version of what others are doing may be the key to the success of your site. Do your best to design a site that keeps customers browsing and shopping, not cursing and exiting.

About the Author:
Jay Schroyer has worked in the client and customer service end of business for over five years in retail, advertising, and printing. He holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in English writing and communication.

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