Simple Ways To Easy Website Browsing
December 1st, 2009 by admin
Good website design implies not only professional and stylish look of your web pages but refers to usability as well. After you have made a striking visual impression on the visitors your next task is to provide easy and convenient browsing for them to estimate your valuable site content. A lot of developers fail to organize the information included to the pages properly which causes confusing situations and is explained by certain mistakes made by webmasters. So here is the list of aspects you must pay attention to if you want your website visitors to find what they are looking for within your site pages easily.
1. Reduce clicking
Try to minimize the number of clicks your visitors must do in order to jump to the information they need quickly. This issue is very important as it both saves the time of your website viewers and increases the chances they will browse your pages longer as the less you force the users to click the less likely they are to leave. Constant clicking annoys visitors and distracts them from the plot of your website content so either they leave or view less content than you offer - you don’t benefit anyway.
Even the splash home page which invites the visitors to enter your site and requires clicking “welcome” or “enter” buttons is considered to be surplus. So you better remove it and spend some time on your website internal structure.
Also check the content of your website every page and get rid of those ones which contain a few words of information combining them with other similar pages. In such way you will reduce clicks the visitor should do within your site menu and prevent them from stumbling on the almost empty pages.
2. Limit the length of the pages
Minimizing clicking a lot of webmasters get long pages with tons of information as a result which is also a big mistake. In order not to go too far you must limit your pages length up to two information screenfuls (the information a user can view on the screen at one time). The only exception in this case implies articles which are much longer and thus require more page length so you can limit such pages up to 7 screenfuls.
3. Make it easy to get back
Sometimes browsing your website pages a lot of visitors need to get back to the location they have started from. So your task is to provide them a way back with the help of “Home” button included in every page. If your website has a clickable logo add some text to it for the users to see that they can reach the home page just clicking on it.
It is very important to provide your visitors with an easy way to get to the home page of your website as a lot of users may start browsing from the middle of your site being redirected from other websites or search lists. So if they become interested in your web pages let them satisfy their needs and provide fast and easy browsing.
4. Add a menu on each page
As you have provided an easy way to get to your website home page make it simple to go to other sections of your website as well. It is recommended to include a menu on each page of your site placing it on the top or on the left - in such way the users will notice it at once. You better not put the menu at the bottom of the page as in case it is long the users may not scroll till its end and thus won’t be able to see the navigation links you put there. However, you may include your menu both on the top/left and at the bottom of the long page - if the visitor reads such page till the end he won’t have to scroll back to get to the menu again.
5. Get rid of frames
Frames help you maintain the same header or menu within your website and a lot of users find it easier to navigate the frame-based website. But still there are reasons for you not to use frames:
- as the users move from one page to another the address bar stays the same which means that they won’t be able to bookmark the specific page, link it and share via email.
- if your site page appears in search engine and the users click it they will see only the subpage without the frame that surrounds it.
These simple techniques will both improve your web pages usability significantly and make the visitors enjoy browsing your website bringing you recognition and profit. So take your time and dedicate some efforts to ameliorate your website reputation for the most fruitful results.
