Be considerate of your website visitors
When planning a web site, one fundamental mistake that companies and individuals make is to fail to distinguish between their own preferences and features which actually provide a comfortable and accessible visitor experience.
The best analogy I can think of here, would be the numerous complaints I've had from female visitors to my house, who insist that I should leave the toilet seat down. My answer of course is that since I live there and I pee standing up I leave the toilet seat up and that is how it stays.
When thinking about the visitor experience on your website though, your guests take precedence since they are the ones who must find it convenient to use if they are going to become your customers. In short, what they find helpful is much more important than what the website owner happens to like or prefer.
In order to get conversions, you need to think about the needs of your guests at every stage, and ask yourselves as many of the following questions as possible:
- Contact details: Are contact details highly visible on every web page?
- Navigation: Is it easy to reach every page, and every product or service you offer from every web page?
- Payment: If it is an ecommerce site, then is the payment process simple? are payment options, delivery information and shipping charges easy to find and understand
- Content: Is the font-size used readable?
- Spelling: Are there any spelling mistakes that need fixing?
- Context: Does each web page have a clear and transparant message and purpose?
- Mess: Is there any clutter that can be got rid of?
- Calls to action: Are calls to action, clear, concise and simple?
- Bells and whistles: Is the website visitor presented with any unexpected and or un-needed surprises such as popups, pop unders.
Lastly, if there is any function or feature of the website that was included purely on the merit that you like it, then can you justify it? Ask yourself whether it is essential and whether it is likely to make a positive or negative impact on the visitor experience. Such features might include excessive use of Flash, audio, Javascript functions and more.
Stumble It!
Posts
2 comments:
After read your post, I realize my blog lack of things that you has mention. I guess I need to edit my page.
Hi Belajar - boy you got in quick. I think I only posted this about 10 mins before you.
To be honest this blog layout is a little lacking as well - a lot of the time its just a matter of spotting usability issues and sorting htem out one by one.
Post a Comment