More than the sections and content of your site, web usability is the most important feature. According to Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group and web design experts:
“ Web usability is the degree of ease of use that a web page has for visitors who enter and interact with it. A website with good usability is one that allows users a simple, intuitive, pleasant and safe interaction.” – Jakob Nielsen, 2012.
Usability is a necessary condition for survival. If a website is difficult to use, people will leave. And for ecommerce: if users cannot find the product, they cannot buy it, so they leave.
Source: BGH. Web usability.
In order to improve the usability of a website, the following main idea or objective should not be lost in sight: putting all the means so that visitors can find what they are looking for with the least effort and in the shortest time possible. It does not matter what the purpose of your website is (commercial, informative, etc.) or the type of content.
The Main Keys to Optimize a Website or Blog for Usability are:
1. Structure the Content Very Well and Organize It According to a Perfectly Defined Hierarchy
This includes a creative, neat and easy to navigate web design. Also, well defined internal sections and pages. Among the most important parts of a web page are the internal sections and pages. Before creating your company’s website, define which ones your site will have, this will avoid that when designing it you are improvising and creating structures that are confusing for your visitors.
If you are going to create a basic web page for your business, it should have the following structure:
- Home or Home Page: It is the cover of your website, it must clearly explain what you offer.
- History of the organization or About the company: Talk about your company so that the users get to know it and highlight the actions your business takes to help customers.
- Services/Products: A detailed list, description and price of your products or services.
- Contact: Phone number, WhatsApp number, email address, location in Google Maps, contact form, etc.
- Promotions: You can upload special offers and continually update it to promote it on social networks. Remember not to abuse pop-ups windows for special offers.
2. The Design Must Be “Clean”
With a use of texts, typography, images and graphic resources that facilitate the user’s work when it comes to finding what they are looking for, ensuring that the different contents (articles, content blogs, etc.) are shown separately and with a logical classification. Do not abuse the use of animations or other elements that can distract the user and try to maintain a consistent design throughout the web and its various links.
3. Neat Menus, Quickly Accessible and Easy to Understand
For an experience to be positive, the user of your website or page should not feel lost at any time. They should always know where they are and how to access another link. For this, the menu must be very accessible and visible, and the titles of the contents of each section must be very clear and strategically placed.
Menus help keep your site tidy and allow your visitors to quickly access the information they are looking for. Experts recommend that a maximum of 7 items be placed on the main menu. If you want to show more elements you can do it in drop-down or secondary menus.
Add a website map to guide the user and Google crawlers, especially if the website contains a lot of content.
4. Texts that Communicate Effectively
Another basic element of a web page is the proper projection of the message. The general objective is to create a website that gives confidence to visitors and for this you need simple and clear language.
Source: BGH. Optimization principles of the visible language.
The images that a web page contains must be original and complement the message you are giving with the text. Original images are key to help the optimization of your website and this could benefit you in Google ranking.
5. Hyperlinks or Link the Page Through Links
Hyperlinks are links that serve to improve navigation within the page. They are usually made between two web pages on the same site, but a link can also point to a page on another website, to a file, to an image.
6. Other Key Factors for Web Usability is Being Able to Share
When people want to know more about a brand (especially when it is about services) they turn to their website and social media. The most popular and most common social media for business are: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube and LinkedIn. To make life easy for your website visitors, place the buttons of your social networks visible, either in the header or footer, so the interaction with your potential customers will increase.
7. Call-to-Action
Even the best designed sites in the world would not be effective if your visitors don’t know where to click. Calls to action are among the most effective elements of a website to incentivize purchases. Including calls to action that are clear and easy to follow is the most appropriate way to guide your visitors to reach your business’ objective: “SELL”. Some examples may be “Click here to register”, “Buy your product HERE”, “Click here to consult us”.
8. Facilitate Interaction
It is also very important that the user can do many things easily and intuitively: display menus, download information, enlarge photos or graphics, etc.
9. Simplify and Synthesize
All superfluous information should be removed or minimized. For this there is a basic rule: “everything that is not necessary, must go”.
10. Adapt the Web to all Kinds of Devices
Another basic element is to adapt the web to mobile phones and tablets because, more and more, users are using these devices to surf the net. Internet use on mobile devices has increased year by year. Therefore, boosting the mobile version of a website will become, if it is not already, an absolute priority of all sites on the Internet. What’s more, you can no longer launch any marketing campaign without a responsive design, at the risk of failing miserably.
“ applying a design to a certain web page that allows it to adapt to all kinds of resolutions, be it a mobile phone, a tablet, widescreen displays or whatever the required resolution.” – LePage
The most important attributes to be taken into account in the adaptable web design are:
- The CSS.
- Percentages better than pixels.
- Selection of images.
If you want to know if your business website is responsive or not, you can do this with some digital tools like Screenfly to screen your entire website on different devices.
Source: BGH. Responsive designs.
11. Website Domain
Last but not least a simple and easy to remember domain name is the cornerstone to a great website. Choosing a good domain can help create a successful website. Domains ending with “.com” are the most common and therefore makes it easier to remember, but also .com.[your country] is good.
Source: BGH. Website domain
12. Safety First
Every website must have the SSL certificate. Secure Sockets Layer or SSL is a global security standard that enables the transfer of encrypted data between a browser and a web server. It is used by millions of online companies to reduce the risk of identity theft and manipulation of confidential information (such as credit card numbers, user names, passwords, emails, etc.) by hackers.
To establish this secure connection, an SSL certificate (also called a “digital certificate”) that serves two functions is installed on a web server:
- Authenticate the identity of the website, guaranteeing visitors that they are not on a fake site.
- Encrypt the transmitted information.
Creating a website is an adventure, from choosing a domain, web hosting plan, web design and much more. In BGH we can help you, Contact us to learn more about how we work and how we can create the perfect website for your business or brand.