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The usability of your website is one of the factors which can make or break it. Who doesn’t get turned off by a poorly designed website with hard to read text and difficult to navigate? According to a study of surfing habits, people immediately place lower value in content on a badly designed website, even though it may be correct or very helpful! Hence, it doesn’t matter to them that you are the best chef in the city or a hardware expert, people are likely to hit the Back button if the site doesn’t present this information in an easy to read and attractive way. In this article, I will list some basic usability measures you can undertake to improve your website.

1. Navigation

Navigation is extremely important, if readers can’t get to your content it doesn’t matter how good it is. If you’re running a personal website and someone interested in your particular field chances upon your site, the first thing they might do is search for other interesting material on your site. The tougher you make it for them to navigate and find this content with confusing links and such, the more likely they are to leave and not come back. You need to be doubly careful if the site is for business. Your website is the online headquarters of your company, users want to be treated to an easy to use, intuitive and navigable interface. Always remember to place all important links in one place on each page with obvious names. For a blog (or even a commerce website), use helpful widgets to point the users to similar products or posts. One of the essentials of a good navigation system is a search function. These days, one can add a custom Google search bar to search your website for free.

2. Cut Down On The Advertisements

Nothing turns off a visitor like flashy advertisements and popups. Popups in fact, are a cardinal sin as far as positive user experience goes. Not only do you lose credibility as a site, you also make a first up negative impression on your visitors who may view your site as one of the countless other spam sites on the Internet. Try to use text links only, like in Adsense, if advertisement revenue is important to maintaining your site. Placement is also very important, long columns of ads can be very visually unappealing. Instead, place ads in between text placed strategically where they might actually be of some use for the visitor. No one really visits your site to look at ads, they’re just the last option the user will go to if they don’t find anything on the site. Try to focus more on content than just trying to make a quick money from ad clicks, in the long term you can build a site that ends up much more valuable than you would have got from the ads.

3. Be Clear In Your Design

This step follows on from step 1, but is very important nonetheless. You must bear in mind that as you are designing the site you know how to use it, but will it be simple for someone who has never visited it before? What might be obvious to you as the site owner/creator may not be immediately apparent to the average user. As said before, use an intuitive navigation system which is clear and consistent throughout the website. Another thing to remember is that when using free templates on the web, try to modify them enough to stand out from other websites. The drawback of “popular” templates is that they tend to be replicated all over the place. At the same time, take care not to change it so radically so that it becomes unusable.

4. Conform to Web Standards

Conforming to the latest web standards is the safest way to ensure all readers to your website see the site as it was designed. Follow a clean and bug free CSS/HTML coding pattern and conform to W3C standards. This fact is important as a large part of the population on the Internet is still using browsers like IE 6 which aren’t very good with reading advance code and can often mess up with JavaScript and AJAX. Test your website in all browsers from the IE versions (6,7,8) to Firefox, Opera and Chrome. You should also keep Flash content to a minimum as it can be distracting, bandwidth hogging and is unreadable to search engines so can’t be indexed.

5. Ask For Feedback!

Feedback from users is the best way to improve your website in many cases. Regardless of how much you optimise the site for your view of it, no one has a better of idea of the users’ needs than the users themselves. That said, keep the feedback techniques as simple as possible without being intrusive. Pop-ups and long surveys are sure to drive visitors away from your site. Instead, opt for a simple feedback form with just a name, email address and comments box for feedback. Not only is this simple, it also allows you to build a mailing list (ensure you ask their permission before you add them to his). On the other hand, you could opt for a slightly more detailed survey but remember to keep it brief as possible try to use checkboxes and dropdowns where appropriate so the user can do this quickly.

The above steps will surely help you come out with a much better looking, intuitive and useful site!