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Whether you’re a business or blogger, the success of your web site depends on many factors. You may have the best content or product but if users are unable to navigate or interface with your site in a user-friendly manner then it’s likely to translate into poor results for, either, your bottom line or viewership. There are many tools that web sites need to employ and web design is as essential as your content. Here’s a list of five ways that you can quickly improve your site’s design and usability.

Improved Navigation:
One of the biggest, and surprisingly most common mistakes that sites make is not having prominent navigation buttons. If some one is browsing through your site on their 4G Slide Android Phone or laptop and the link buttons are too small or blend into the background then it’s going to make for a poor user experience. They won’t be able to navigate through your site and see the features or services that you provide. It can frustrate a user and they will commonly abandon a site that is difficult to use.

Making The Message Clear:
It’s far too common for sites to use a lot of graphics in their sites. You don’t want your page to be boring and devoid of color or style but too much can overwhelm a person and make your site unappealing. Less is more and the best way to communicate your message to audiences is by being short and to the point.

Just The Right Size:
If you’re blogging or describing a product, you may be very excited and have a lot to say but you don’t want to take up a whole page to say it. A frequent mistake is to make the font size smaller to supplement the space that you’re working in. This is a bad idea. You should never make the font size smaller than 10 or larger than 14. Look at most successful web sites, they follow this rule. Not doing so will make your message hard to read. Also, don’t use fancy, or odd, font styles. This just makes the reading that much harder. Stand out with your products or intellectual approach, not your presentation. It’s best to follow the format and stand out in other ways.

Too Many Links:
Social Media has definitely been a game changer and often sites want to increase their online profile by providing links to all of their extra pages and various content off-site. Sometimes, this has brought down the usability or function of a site. The desire to connect your readers to all of your other sources can often clutter up a page and confuse the content with the links. Adding links is fine but you need to do it thoughtfully and sparingly. If someone is interested in looking at your Facebook or Twitter page, they’ll find it but don’t overwhelm them with your dozen, or so, external links.

Scrolling:
This last one is simple but essential. Do not add a left-to-right scroll. This used to be done often on sites years ago but it’s a really antiquated way of interacting with a page. You should only incorporate vertical scrolling on your page. Keep your most important information up top and less important content in descending order. Don’t cram you site full of material that’s going in every direction, that’s poor planning.

If you’ve found that you’re not getting the kind of following you’d like then look at some of these quick ways that you can improve your site’s overall usability. There are many ways that you can do this so look online and seek advice on what you can do towards this aim. Also, one of the best tips is to look at what the competition is doing. Often sites run along a similar approach and you don’t want to look just like the competition but you do want to get your message across clearly. This is essential to having a successful design to your site.

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This entry was posted on Monday, July 18th, 2011 at 12:01 pm and is filed under Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.