Make Your Website Better

These are my top ten usability tips, based on the work I do with clients and the problems I see most often:

1. Be clear on your business and marketing plans. If your business is undergoing an identity crisis, wait until you’ve resolved it.
2. Know your audience and focus on them, not you. Talk to your customers and prospects. Find out what their demographics, interests and wants are.
3. Listen to your audience: ask 3-5 people to use your site while you observe their activities..
4. Follow conventions for Web usability and design.
5. Be consistent.
6. Put your company name and an effective tagline in the top left corner of every page, and link that to your home page.
7. Break content into chunks and use subheads and boldface for easy reading.
8. Use black (or dark) text on plain, high-contrast backgrounds and scalable text sizing so users can choose readable font size.
9. Use a unique page title on every page (it appears in the top bar of the browser window) to help users find you in Google searches.
10. Make sure your site loads quickly. Time is money, and visitors are not willing to wait very long for your pages to appear.

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