Website Usability – Check These10 Elements To Ensure Your Website Homepage Is User Friendly
Imagine yourself as your customer surfing the Internet and landing at your home page for the first time. Take some time to really analyze how you feel when you are looking at this page. Does the information in the top fold of the page (the part of your website that fits the screen before scrolling) get your attention? Are the colors easy on your eyes? Does the page appear to be laid out well and look easy to navigate? If you don’t know or cannot say “yes” to all of these questions, then maybe the web usability of your home page is not user friendly.
Your home page is the most important page of your website and will either convince people to stay on your site or leave. Take time to make sure that everything is put together correctly to make your website is as enjoyable as possible.
Here are 10 elements of your site you should check before it goes live to ensure that your home page is user friendly and usable:
1. Your website should have a fast load time. When somebody arrives at your web page they do not want to wait forever for it to load. Avoid using too many graphics, videos, flash, or audios on your home page that will slow down the load time. The easier and faster your home page loads, the more likely your visitors will stick around to check out other pages on your website.
2. Make your navigation easy and intuitive. If someone has to search all over the page to try to figure out how to get around in your site, they will head for the back browser are as fast as they can. Putting your navigation along the top of the page or on the left of the page is typical for many websites and it is where your website visitors usually expect navigation to be. Don’t try to be creative with your web page and put the navigation in some obscure area of the page. It will make it hard for your visitors to find. Keep it simple, to keep your visitors.
3. Make your content interesting. When someone first arrives to your site, you want to make sure to get his or her attention. If the content on your home page does not draw them in, they will be gone in a flash. Remember, you only have a few seconds to get someone’s attention on a web page. You want your content to grab their interest and keep them around. One way you can measure this indirectly is to examine the “time on page” metric in your web analytics. Look at how much time your visitors are spending on your web pages. And look at which pages receive more or less attention than your “average.” You will observe some interesting things in your site data that can hint to which pages are gaining attention, and which aren’t.
4. Make your links easy to recognize. Remember that most of your visitors are not computer technicians and are not completely familiar with the Internet. They expect to see design conventions like blue underlined text to indicate a link to another page. Do not confuse your visitors by making them have to figure out what is a link and what is not.
5. Make your home page short and sweet. Only put important information on the home page so that it will lead visitors to other pages within your site. Your home page should clearly convey the purpose of your website and not scroll on forever. Too much information can overwhelm your visitors.
6. Contact and About Us links should be on every page. You can gain more trust from your website visitors by making your contact information readily available on every page of your site. You should include your name, e-mail address or feedback form, and phone number on an “About Us” page so your website visitors feel confident that you are legitimate and readily available to contact if they need assistance.
7. Use a Web friendly color palette. Choose the right colors. Your website is easier to read if you use black text on a white background. Don’t shock your website visitors by putting black text over a bright pink background. Not only is this visually painful to the eyes, but it will make them want to leave your site as quick as they got there. Remember that an important part of web usability for your website is choosing colors that are easy on the eyes.
8. Create search engine friendly pages. It is important that you have your Meta title tag, description tag, and keyword tags optimized for search engines. Also be sure to add alt tags to the graphics on the page because search engines won’t know what images your site has without them. Use tags for your most important headings and the tags for your subheadings. This tells the search engines the relative importance of this information.
9. Check your HTML. In order to have effective web usability, you need to check your HTML code on the home page to ensure that it is done correctly.
10. Check your site for browser compatibility. Check your website out on different browsers. Your website could look perfect in Windows Internet Explorer, but look completely different in other browsers. By checking out your home page’s web usability in different browsers, you can be assured that your page will be viewed by everyone the same way.The four most popular and important browsers to check are Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, and Chrome. There are websites where you can check this via your url, or you can simply view your site in each of these browsers yourself.
Follow these ten simple tips, and have other people use your website and give you input about the homepage. A quick homepage pre check will help you avoid any critical usability problems. If time and budget permits, it is always good to conduct professional usability testing on your site as well.
Jay Eskenazi, Ph.D. has helped many top eCommerce companies improve their online website experiences through usability consulting and research, including usability testing, eye tracking and focus groups. Sign up for FREE tips about how to improve your online website experience at http://www.CustomerExperienceLabs.com
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