Twelve steps to designing a user friendly website.

  The following is a list of features that, taken together, will make a website easier for new and returning visitors to use. Virtually all user friendly websites have most or all of these features.... particularly commercial websites.

These things will make your website more user friendly:

 Fast-loading pages, especially your home page.
  The majority of your visitors are going to be entering your website from the home page. There are few things more frustrating than going to a website for the first time and staring at a blank screen for 30 seconds.
  Design your home page a little differently from the inner pages in order to make it load as fast as possible. Under ten seconds is good, under fifteen is usually acceptable, anything over that and many people will leave.
  All pages should load as fast as possible. It's generally understood and accepted that some pages take a while to load, nevertheless, you should do the best you can to reduce file sizes. There is more on that subject here, and you may want to run your pages through an HTML optimizer to reduce download time. Doctor HTML can do this for free.

  Easy-to-understand navigation.
  Very few people will take the time to puzzle out a "non-standard" navigational menu. Give your visitors website navigation that they don't have to think about.
  In most cases that means that your navigation design should follow the conventional design characteristics... image links to major sections along the top, links in a column along the left (or right) side and "administrative" text links along the bottom.
  There is more information about that on the Menu Design page.

  Along with easy navigation, an easy to use Site Search function.
  Few people are willing to wade through page after page of an online catalog, unless they don't know exactly what they are looking for. If they do know exactly what they want, a site search function is a definite plus.
  FreeFind.com has a full-featured site search tool, with free and paid versions, for all types of websites.

  A clear and concise "Statement of Purpose" on each page.
  When someone lands at your webpage, the first thing they see should tell them right away what the page is about AND what they will gain from staying, from joining, from buying, etc...

  Page text that is easy to scan.
  Internet users are notoriously impatient, and most people scan a page rather than actually read from beginning to end.
  Make paragraphs short, four sentences, maybe five at the most. Make headers and sub-headers larger, and bold the text for any sentence fragment that you feel deserves special attention. Leave blank space between paragraphs.

  Easy to find contact information.
  This is vital, especially if you are selling your own products or services. People want to know that they can get in touch with a real person if they have any problems or questions.

  Correct spelling, good grammar and an overall 'Professional Attitude'.
  Your visitors are coming from all corners of the globe. Avoid using slang or colloquialisms that may confuse or offend some visitors.
  Any decent text or HTML editor has a spell-check function. Use It.
  Get a friend to proof-read your content for grammatical errors you may have missed.

  An easy to use, full featured shopping cart system.
  Offering all possible payment options is just good business sense.
  If you can't afford a merchant account with all the bells and whistles, ClickBank has a good system for electronic products, and PayPal has a pretty good alternative too.
  Personally, I prefer PayPal because it's free and you will still be able to accept e-checks and major credit cards. Plus, your customer no longer needs to open a PayPal account to buy from you. (That means you won't lose customers to a difficult & confusing shopping cart system.)

  All links should work correctly.
  Sure, you can make your own 404-error page, but there is no good reason to show it off. Irritated customers don't buy anything, so make sure that all of your links are working.
  There is a good free Windows program that will check your links at Xenu's Link Sleuth™. It gives you a detailed report showing any broken links it finds.

  Valid HTML code and Document Type Definition.
  HTML Validation is simply making sure that your pages use the correct DTD and that there are no errors in your code. This will improve the usability by eliminating browser problems and most of the browser incompatibilities.
  With valid HTML, all the major (and most of the minor) browsers will display your webpages correctly. You can validate your HTML for free and learn more about DTDs at www.w3.org.

  Accurate page title tags and META-descriptions.
  Search engines list this information in the search results. Make sure this information is accurate for what is on the page.

  ALT tags in the images.
  Some people are still using browsers that don't display images, some people have 'turned off' the images in their browsers. Without the ALT descriptions in your image tags they don't have a clue what the image is for or about.
  It is vital that all image links use the ALT description to tell what the link is for.
  This is also important now that search engines are starting to index the text written in the ALT descriptions.

  Compatibility with all major browser and display options.
  Something like 70 or 80% of internet users use Internet Explorer. Over 60% of surfers are still viewing pages on an 800 by 600 pixel screen. If you design and check your website only in MSIE at 1024 by 768 pixels you risk having 20 or 30% of your potential customers viewing a website that looks and acts very different from what you want.
  A simple, accurate way to test your pages in different browsers is to just get copies of the top 3 or 4 browsers and check for yourself as you are building your pages.
  Remember to check at different resolutions too, or just design your pages for fixed width at 570 pixels. (You have to allow up to 30 pixels for the scrollbar.)

  All that may seem a little daunting at first.
  I can guarantee, though, that any webmaster who ignores more than a few of the usability features listed above is making a mistake. Making things difficult or confusing for your visitors is a sure way to make sure that you will never be bothered by having too many customers.

By Tim Brown © 2006. About the author: Tim is the webmaster at http://BLT-Web.com, where webmasters can find free tools, advice, tips and other useful resources designed to help them build a successful website.

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