How To Improve The Usability Of Your Site To Retain Visitors
After spending a considerable amount of money time and effort in building and creating a website, it’s disastrous if you can’t render a good user experience on your site. Usability plays a major role in the performance of your website. It helps make your site attractive and fun to use and easy for visitors to locate what they are searching for.
There is a general belief that investment in usability of your website is a very expensive affair. It's true there are several companies who spend thousands on usability research and analysis.
However for small businesses that have a limited budget there are a few techniques that you can follow to improve the usability of your website.
Include the brand’s tagline
The tagline of your brand is what depicts your company and its principles in a nutshell. Place your tagline at the top of your page like a banner. It should be catchy and precise to attract the attention of the visitor and instill an interest to go through the rest of your website.
Apply search bar.
It’s a good idea to implement a site search bar in your website as it would help users ease locate what they are looking for. And if you can implement an auto fill feature to it, it’s the best.
Don’t overdo the graphics
Use only relevant and required graphics on your site as too many graphics make your site bulky and slow them down considerably. Also remember to optimize the images that you use to make your website more precise.
Include Site maps
Site maps give a complete picture of the site ‘s architecture and layout. This is specifically searching engine friendly as well as gives users a clear idea of how your site is structured and how to move about it. This feature is used for search engine optimization.
Navigation
The navigation of your website influences the performance of your website in a big way. It should be intuitive and simple. The user should not have any hassles using it. Using a breadcrumb trail is a good idea as it shows where the user is and how he/she got there. Also when designing the structure of the navigation make it wider rather than narrow as it is search engine friendly as well as easy to reach the destination with a minimum of 3 clicks.
Create easy to read pages
While arranging the content on your website, you have to ensure that it is scalable. That is the user should have a clear idea of what your website is all about with just a quick scan through your site. Arrange your images in an attractive manner, use appropriate colors, fonts, sizes and styles to improve the readability. Highlight all the important data so that it looks prominent.
Focus on the feedback. The feedback page is important, it’s the only avenue where you can directly interact with your visitors. So handle this area carefully. If by any chance the user has to be directed to an error page, make sure you give a meaningful reason and respond quickly to solve the issue.
