Simple Rules For a User Friendlier Website

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Increasingly, businesses are looking more and more to the Internet for not only marketing purposes, but for establishing and maintaining relevancy in this digital age. Digital marketing is great for brands for countless reasons; however, what many companies forget when attempting to re-connect with its audience online is that a brand’s own website is viewed as a representation of the organization’s overall image. If that website is not designed in a manner that is user-friendly, the brand’s image may be negatively impacted as a result.

This is why it is important for web designers to know the fine art of developing visually-stimulating, engaging sites that are user-friendly for both human visitors and search engine spiders alike. If the search engines are not finding your website online (unless you have a popular brand name), chances are your audience cannot find you either. Although there is no real set of “standards” for website design, here are six simple, easy to incorporate rules that should be followed while developing and maintaining a site on the Internet.

Limit Flash, Images

Although they do increase the visual aspects of a website, Flash and images slow down a site’s load time, may not render in mobile browsers, and cannot be properly read and indexed by search engines. While it is not necessary to completely eliminate either Flash or images from your pages, your entire site should not consist of just these elements. Where possible, substitute Flash with jquery and load any images you can through the css background tag.

Decrease Page Load Time

As mentioned above, reducing the amount of Flash and images utilized within your site will help increase load time, but there are other means to do so as well. Place any on-page JavaScript as close to the tag as possible, so that everything else on the page loads before these sometimes larger scripts. Limit the number of CSS files linked to a particular page by combining into one, and move any on-page CSS into the main stylesheet. Finally, remove any whitespace on both the CSS files and HTML as possible; it may not seem major, but this can dramatically reduce the overall page size.

Conduct Tests on All Browsers

The segmentation of the Internet has extended to browser use as well; more users everyday are utilizing less-common means of navigating the web, such as Google’s Chrome, Opera, and various mobile phone-based browsers. When designing a site, try it out on numerous browser types to ensure that everyone visiting the site will have the best experience possible, no matter how they got there.

Use Header and Footer Navigation

It may seem obvious, but many website designers only include internal navigation within either the header or the footer, but not both. If a visitor to your site is at the bottom of a page, a good method of keeping them engaged with you site, instead of bouncing to another, is to present your site links to them once again.

Don’t Disguise your Ads

Humans don’t tend to respond well to being fooled, and this is no different on the Internet. If you hide advertisements within content as text links, users may think that the link is actually taking them to another source of relevant information, and most likely, will not be too happy when they find they were tricked into clicking on an ad.

Don’t use Pop-Ups/Pop-Unders

Although pop-up advertising has not been commonly used for years, many sites will still try to slip these in on occasion. The most popular desktop browsers all have pop-up blockers, rendering these advertisements useless anyway. They also don’t add to the visitor experience.

Creating a “user-friendly” experience online should always be a brand’s number goal with their website. Internet users tend to be impatient and do not want to spend time waiting for a page to load; and if the site isn’t viewable on whichever browser they are using at the time, you may have lost those potential customers for good.

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