5 Tips For Making A User-Friendly Website
Do you ever browse the web with several different tabs open?
Every other page is just a click away…
And that’s how easy it is for people to leave your site if they find it confusing.
It’s not enough to have any old website. Especially if you want to make an impact. People should have a pleasant experience on your site in order for you to attract leads, make sales, or provide value of any kind.
People of all technology skills visiting your website, so spending time figuring out your website won’t be at the top of everyone’s list.
Here are tips to make their web browsing experience a friendly one…
1. Have a Consistent layout on every page
Many sorts of designs are available today. Whatever you choose to do, keep things fairly consistent on each page. Especially your menus and navigation.
If visitors can’t figure out how to get where they want to go, they click away.
While you may want to do something really unique with your layout, also keep in mind what the design trends are. Most visitors are used to navigation at the top of the site. Reference Facebook, Twitter, and other popular sites for what most internet users are most familiar with.
2. Text should be big enough to read
No newspaper sized fonts here… people don’t want to squint. Many people want to skim and leave, so make your pages easily readable. Most browsers default as showing text at about 16pt.
I’ve seen many sites use smaller, which can get tough on the eyes. I design using 16 as a minimum for any text that people will be reading. This article uses an 18pt font.
3. Differentiate links from other text
The default for most browsers is black text, blue underlined links. Modern design allows sites to use any number of font and color combinations so it doesn’t need to stay that way… as long as visitors can clearly see that clickable text links are different than the surrounding text.
BONUS: Make clickable items change when hovered over.
This gives users an extra hint that links or buttons are clickable.
4. Make it clear what to do next.
Always have a next step.
It can be clicking a “buy now” button, signing up for your newsletter, reading an article, or sending you a message. But always make it clear what the next item is.
As soon as someone lands on a page, they should know what to do too. Have some content visible they can start reading, so don’t let your navigation and header take up the whole page.
5. Make it easy to learn about you and contact you.
Visitors like to know who’s behind the site. This will help to build trust, especially if they’re about to give you money. So be sure to include an about page.
Also if people have questions, they should be able to contact you. Not everyone does, but just having an email or phone number listed helps build trust with the visitor.
Implement those and you’ll have your very own user-friendly website.
What user-friendly elements do you like on other websites? Which can you use on your own site? Leave a comment below.