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Usability Techniques for your Website

Sam Mah

Website design has a significant impact on attracting and keeping visitors. Follow these simple techniques for making your website easy to navigate and user friendly.

1. Get to know your audience

You want a site that has personality and quality content based on your audience taste. You have to understand their color preferences, technical skills and any prevalence of special needs. Build your website layout at 780 by 600 to fit 800 by 600 screen resolution.

2. Make the interface simple and obvious

The more obvious the interface is, the less frustration the site visitor has to guess about how your site works. You want the audience to concentrate on the content, not the interface.

3. Readability

Make paragraph easy to read. Don't use small text for font size. Allow your website to resize on a site user's browser.

4. Make your page fast loading

Reduce the waiting time is a must if your page over 20KB.

5. Avoid hidden (rollover to reveal) navigation

It makes for a very clean design if all your navigation is hidden, but it may also mean that people won't know where to click to go somewhere.

6. Get user feedback

Find out what works and what doesn't.

7. Study site visitor performance

How long does it take to perform a given task? The time it takes to do thing has got to be reasonable. If it's not reasonable, improve user interaction wherever possible.

8. Help section (site map, 404)

A 404 and site map page considers an usability aid tool. If you remove a page from the server, build a 404 page to direct them to see a different page. This is good for search engine spiders and site users.

9. Check HTML codes

Test your code for bugs on web browsers. Test the interface for usability. Ask your friends and colleagues for in depth and valuable feedback. Most people do not realize that invalid code causes display problems. This can hurt your site users and search engine rankings. Use an HTML tool to check your HTML tags at http://validator.w3.org/ for valid and current tags.

About the Author: My name is Sam H Mah. I am a 2 year web designer who creates search engine friendly websites that receive relevant traffic and boost search engine ranking on Google, Yahoo and MSN. Request a free usability critique.
Source: www.isnare.com