Envisioning Success

Is Your Website Easy to Use?

Posted by Chris Shockley under General

One of the oft forgotten things about a website are:

• Humans will actually be reading it and they may not know you or anything about you, your product or your service.

• Your website has one or many actual business goals to achieve.

If you haven’t heard this term yet, you should make sure you try and understand it (or make sure your web designer does).

It’s Usability.

The concept is not new at all. We all like products that are easy to use, easy to understand, that don’t frustrate us and, whenever possible, don’t require instructions.

With the advent of the internet and websites, there are tons of people creating sites and content that have not training in this arena, but because they can, they do.

There are plenty of tools and products out there that let anybody put a website together.

This is nice enough, but, as you might expect, you end up with websites that are:

• not the easiest to navigate,
• not the most organized and in fact
• often hinder visitor conversion (IE: Site visitors actually becoming customers).

Much of my effort in web design is making sure the content is written properly, there is a good balance between white space, content, and graphic elements, as well as, making sure the site fundamentally looks professional enough so that visitors can see that the company put some effort into making their website presentable.

I’ve written a previous article which covers much of the pitfalls and enhancements one can use to improve their website so I won’t rehash all that information again.

I am simply challenging business owners to make sure they put enough time and energy into the company’s website. Whenever possible hire someone who is both competent as a web designer and is business oriented. You don’t need, nor do you want an artist who happens to do websites.

If you’d like more information on usability, here is a great article. It is focused on blogs, but the priciples apply to all websites.

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Chris Shockley is owner of Envision Design Solutions and has been building websites for over 12 years. He can be reached via the web: http://www.EnvisionDesignSolutions.com/