Websites have become so much more than just pages of text and information. Users today expect your website to entertain them, provide quality and provide an easy-to-use, pleasant experience. Everything from how your site looks to where your calls to action are placed can affect how long people stay on your page. It is easy to make your website more accessible for people to use.
If you're like most customers, that user experience likely changed how you feel about the company as a whole. You might have even gone with a competitor whose website was more professional.
As a user-friendly web design service, it's important to think about this kind of experience.
Why? Your website presence is essential to the success of your digital marketing and some errors can seriously hurt your reputation as a good company.
To help you avoid this, we've put together a list of things you need to know about making a website that is easy to use. Let's get started.
Follow The WCAG Rules.
The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) were made so that people with disabilities can use websites. The WCAG is also changed from time to time, so it's important to check back often to see what's new.
Here are some kinds of disabilities that can make it hard for people to use websites:
Auditory
People with hearing problems range from those who have trouble hearing to those who can't hear at all. If your website depends on videos, music or other sound-related media, you'll want to make sure that your website design company can handle them.
Cognitive
People with cognitive disabilities can have a wide range of problems, from mental problems to neurological problems like Alzheimer's and dementia.
Physical
Physical problems make it hard for a person to move around. This could include their ability to walk, use their limbs or move their whole body. It also includes people whose limbs have been cut off.
Speech
Speech problems can range from stuttering to being unable to speak at all. As a result, these users will find it hard or impossible to use programs like voice commands.
Visual
Color blindness affects about 300 million people around the world. That doesn't mean they only see things in black and white, though. It just means that some colors look different to them.
Fast Time to Load
People don't like to wait, so if a site is slow, they won't stick around. You might be surprised to learn that in the US, only 6% of the 74% of homes that have internet still use dial-up. In the UK, where 85% of homes have an internet connection, 17% of those connections are dial-up connections. Using emulators with 56K internet connections is an excellent way to test how long it takes your website to load. There are many ways to make your user-friendly website run faster and most of these emulators will show you how. Some of the most common suggestions are to compress HTML, CSS and JavaScript files and use small images (ideally making use of thumbnails to show previews of images).
If you want your site to load quickly, get rid of all the extra things that aren't being used. If you have too many videos and other multimedia on your site, it will run slower. Many websites have extra features that make the pages slow to load, which makes it harder to make a site that is easy to use.
Clear Requests to Act (CTAs)
User-friendly websites that can be used are the most powerful. Calls to action (CTAs) should be right up front, with a clear point and the correct link.
Watch the WWF's page on "Why should we save the tigers?" The CTA (Donate) is in three places on the page and as the user scrolls, one of them moves. But none of the CTAs is annoying and they don't try to stop the user from reading the content or take their attention away from it.
• Calls to action (CTAs) should be easy to find, placed well (if needed) on every page and be part of a simple user action that can be done from start to finish.
• A CTA must make it clear what to expect. No one should end up on a page to sign up for an event when the CTA may have led them to believe they would be donating.
• The text should be easy to read and a different color than the button.
Don't Put Too Many Calls To Action On A Single Page.
Make Online Forms Websites often use efficient forms to collect information from users and/or let users do something, such as payment information forms on e-commerce sites. But did you know that forms are one of the places where web users get stuck and leave? Follow these simple rules for making good online forms to avoid this:
• Put your form questions in a logical order; start with the most important ones and work your way down.
• Keep the information fields to a single column. More than one column can make it hard to understand.
• Use colors, information pop-ups and sample field text as visual cues and tooltips to help users fill out the information correctly.
• Finish with a confirmation message like "Thank you, application submitted" to reassure users that the form submission was successful.
• Provide clear CTA buttons like "Submit" or "Pay Now" to ensure the user knows what will happen.
Use Calls To Action That Are Interesting.
Your customers are already used to using visual clues to figure out what information is essential to them. Calls to action (CTAs) that are clearly labeled with an action word makes it easier for your website users to find what they're looking for and find it where they expect to find it.
You should think about color and how it affects people when making buttons for your website development company. In a study done by Maximizer, researchers were shocked to find that by testing different colors and calls to action, they were able to get 11% more people to click on the checkout button on the Laura Ashley website. Different colors evoke different messages. Think about the message you want to send to a user (trust, experience, intelligence) and choose your colors wisely.
WUFOO is an excellent example of a call to action that works well. The whole user-friendly website design service page is about taking action and uses buttons to get the user to move on. At the bottom of the page, you'll see words like "Sign up now" and "Get Started" that tell you to do something right away. These are active words that tell and show the user what to do next.
Overall,
Websites have grown into more than just pages with some text and pictures on them. Visitors to your site expect to find helpful information and have an easy time using it. If your website wasn't made with the user in mind, you can change it to make it a more user-friendly website and add tools and software to help you get new customers and keep the ones you already have. You can get more prospects, make more sales, keep more customers and get a better return on your investment (ROI).
If your website has broken links or navigation that doesn't belong on that page or in that text, try to fix them as soon as possible. They make your website harder to use. By keeping these connections, you give the impression that you don't care about how you use the Internet.