Four Must-Haves for User-Friendly Websites
Unfortunately, user-friendliness is a characteristic that is often neglected when it comes to website designing. Truth be told, building user-friendly websites is critical to business growth and success. The reason behind this is that users tend to stay and even come back to websites that are easy to navigate. And when they stay for long and visit often, they end up making purchases, ultimately contributing to business growth and success.
If you are striving to increase your website clicks and online sales, check its usability and interface. These two elements work hand in hand to provide a seamless user experience and set your website apart from competitors.
Here are some important characteristics of a user-friendly website.
1. Compatibility with Different Devices
The first and foremost characteristic that you should consider in website designing to increase usability is making it compatible with different devices, especially smartphones.
The majority of users today tend to use smartphones for everything instead of using desktop computers and laptops. In fact, the use of these two is getting limited for work purposes only.
This is the reason you should endeavor to make your website design responsive and easy-to-use. There are web-based mobile website builders that you can to create a mobile version of your website or even hire a professional to get it done.
2. Inclusiveness
As much as you can, try to make your website accessible for everyone, regardless of their ‘special’ needs. A perfect user-friendly website is one that allows the elderly, blind, and even the disabled to use it and the features that enable them to do so is ‘on-screen reading’.
There are different web design guidelines that you can use to permit on-screen reading for those that rely on it to surf through. This ultimately increases the accessibility of your website for a larger audience, gets you more website visitors and purchases, and contributes to increased revenues.
3. Easy-to-Read and Understandable Website Content
Another thing that adds to the user-friendliness bit of a website is the type of content, its understandability, and formatting.
It is easy to produce lots of articles and blogs, apply fancy fonts, and publish them on your website. But unlike the common misconception, this type of marketing will do no good.
When it comes to web design, you should be more focused on quality instead of quantity. Focus on producing and publishing content that is of interest for the users, is easy-to-comprehend, and well-placed.
Imagine visiting a website that has its homepage filled with text entirely. Would you like to stay? We think not!
4. Website Load Time
Another thing that becomes the reason customers don’t stay on a web page for long or resist visiting it is websites that take too long to load. This, in fact, is more annoying than you think.
Ideally, your website should not take more than 4 to 6 seconds to fully load. Today, there are specific tools that help reduce website load time. You can either implement on your own or hire a professional to efficiently do it. A great start would be to find out if you need a better web hosting provider and then move on with what can be improved on your end like images and more.
“User experience is everything. It always has been, but it’s undervalued and underinvested in. If you don’t know about user-centered designs, study it. Hire people who know it.’
- Evan Williams, Co-founder Twitter
Don’t know where to begin? Connect with the website development experts at MK Marketing today to discuss your possibilities.
