At Meatball Web Blog, we give you some free tips and trciks to help you with your web design and development projects. Here are some tips for you to consider when building a website. For web design and developement related articles please check the menu on the right side.
1. Bad SEO
Overly done SEO reduce usability in that they’re unable to handle typos, plurals, hyphens, and other variants of the query terms. Any SEO Toronto Canada company will tell you such SEO often gets very hard to make sense of.
A related problem is when search engines prioritize results purely on the basis of how many query terms they contain, rather than on each document’s importance. Much better if your search engine calls out “best bets” at the top of the list — especially for important queries, such as the names of your products.
2. Avoid PDF Files for Online Reading
Users hate coming across a PDF file while browsing, because it breaks their flow. Even simple things like printing or saving documents are difficult because standard browser commands don’t work. Layouts are often optimized for a sheet of paper, which rarely matches the size of the user’s browser window.
PDF is great for printing and for distributing manuals and other big documents that need to be printed. Reserve it for this purpose and convert any information that needs to be browsed or read on the screen into real web pages.
A web design Toronto company such DesignTorontoWeb.ca can help you with their suggestions of what is good for a well organized website.
3. Change the Color of Visited Links
Knowing past and present locations makes it easier to decide where to go next. Links are a key factor in navigation process. Users can exclude links that proved fruitless in their earlier visits. Conversely, they might revisit links they found helpful in the past.
Most importantly, knowing which pages they’ve already visited frees users from unintentionally revisiting the same pages over and over again.
These benefits only accrue under one important assumption: that users can tell the difference between visited and unvisited links because the site shows them in different colors. When visited links don’t change color, users exhibit more navigational disorientation in usability testing and unintentionally revisit the same pages repeatedly.
A content management system CMS could let you make changes to your website on your own and fix all these problems to save your some cost of having a web developer update your site for you.
4. Readable Text
To draw users into the text and support scannability, use well-documented tricks:
- subheads
- bulleted lists
- highlighted keywords
- short paragraphs
- the inverted pyramid
- a simple writing style, and
- de-fluffed language devoid of marketese.
5. Reasonable Font Size
Respect the user’s preferences and let them resize text as needed. Also, specify font sizes in relative terms — not as an absolute number of pixels.
6. Page Titles With Low Search Engine Visibility
Search is one of the most important ways users find their way around websites. A proper page title is the main tool to attract new visitors from search listings and to help your existing users to locate the specific pages that they need.
Page titles are also used as the default entry in the Favorites when users bookmark a site. For your homepage, begin the with the company name, followed by a brief description of the site.
Since the page title is used as the window title in the browser, it’s also used as the label for that window in the taskbar under Windows.
Taglines on homepages are a related subject: they also need to be short and quickly communicate the purpose of the site.
7. Design Conventions
Consistency is one of the most powerful usability principles: when things always behave the same, users don’t have to worry about what will happen. Instead, they know what will happen based on earlier experience.
The more users’ expectations prove right, the more they will feel in control of the system and the more they will like it. And the more the system breaks users’ expectations, the more they will feel insecure.
8. Answer to Users
Users are highly goal-driven on the Web. They visit sites because there’s something they want to accomplish — maybe even buy your product. The ultimate failure of a website is to fail to provide the information users are looking for.
Sometimes the answer is simply not there and you lose the sale because users have to assume that your product or service doesn’t meet their needs if you don’t tell them the specifics. Other times the specifics are buried under a thick layer of marketese and bland slogans. Since users don’t have time to read everything, such hidden info might almost as well not be there.
9. E-commerce Solutions
Today, e-commerce solutions can let you do SEO on your site quite easily. But as usual, SEO is still a lot of work. For best results you should really consider hiring the professional SEO experts. In case you require complex custom ecommerce software development, you can talk to the developers at ECA Technologies inc.