How to Make Your Website User-Friendly
With so much business now being conducted online, creating a website that is user-friendly should be right at the top of your priority list. As there is so much competition out there, people are much more likely to head over to one of your competitors if they can’t easily find the information they are looking for.
There are a number of different approaches that you can take. One is to go to a company like the UX Agency which specialises in user-friendly design and taking a collaborative approach to websites. If you are looking for some general ideas of how to make your site more user-friendly, here are a few top tips.
Strategically Place Your Logo and Contact Information
Your website is what people will most associate with your business, so you need to make sure that it is clearly on display. Research has shown that the top left corner is a good place to choose and it is where people’s eyes are naturally drawn. And your contact information is also absolutely essential. People are often not willing to work particularly hard to find this, so you should make sure it is clearly on display. Include all the different methods you have – phone, email, social media – so people can take their pick.
Make Content Easy to Skim-Read
Although content on a website is obviously important, people don’t tend to read everything word for word. So, you should make sure that everything is easy to skim over for them. Include bullet points and subheadings to break up big chunks of text. This way, people can easily pick out the information that they are looking for – whether this is a particular feature of a product or the details of a service that you offer.
Include a Search Functionality
If you have a website with a lot of pages and information to scour through, adding a search functionality is very useful so people are able to quickly find what they are looking for. Like we talked about at the start, web users tend to be very ruthless with their time so if they can’t quickly pick out what they have come to find, they are likely to go elsewhere.
Make Your Site Responsive
Over half of all web searches now come from smartphones, so making sure that your site is responsive is very important. You want to give an equally good experience to every visitor, regardless of what device they are using to access your website.
Keep the Navigation Simple and Easy to Follow
You want people to be able to find their way around on your website without too much difficulty, so keep the navigations as easy to follow as you can. Name each page in a way that is clear what people are going to find when they are on there. The sub-navigation should also relate directly to the main navigation. You could also put in links that bring people directly back to the home screen so they can start again.