Designing an aesthetically pleasing website is great as it attracts the attention of online users and inspires curiosity to want to read the content of the site. However, as pretty as your website is, it is completely useless if users find it impossible or annoying to use. Creating a great website is a long process that requires attention to many details, with the most important one being ensuring a user-friendly menu. Having a user-friendly website is critical to the success of the site in many ways. It can help you generate sales, create a loyal group of followers, generate traffic, and even rank high in search engine ranking. Below are the qualities of a user-friendly website.
Easy Navigation
Everyone knows that an easy to navigate website makes it easy for users to maneuver around the site and access whatever available information. However that is not the only function of an easy to navigate interface. Easy navigation also provides a way for internet spiders to easily find all the webpages of a given website. Spiders normally seek out a site’s navigation and then travel down the many paths that lead to all available pages so as to index the site onto the internet alongside the many websites that exist. With poor navigation, search spiders will not be able to access all pages thereby resulting in fewer indexed pages which in turn translates to fewer chances of attracting traffic and thus defeating any SEO efforts.
Properly Placed Navigation-Bar
A website’s navigation menu should always be in an area that is easy to spot. The most ideal places to put the navigation menu would be in a bar at the top or a column on the left hand side of the homepage. Both positions are ideal as they are where a viewer’s eyes would normally look. This is because human beings tend to read a page from top to bottom and from left to right.
Uncluttered Pages
Too much chaos on pages chases visitors away. When there is too much going on in a page such as illustrations, pictures, and text, users get confused and quickly leave the website. No one has the patience of sifting through heaps of irrelevant information before finally finding what he/she is looking for. Therefore your website should have clean and tidy webpages which make it easy to find information if you are interested in gluing visitors to the site.
Good And Obvious Links
Links are part and parcel of websites, however for them to serve their intended purpose, they must be obvious. Obvious links are important as they grab the viewer’s attention and show them that there is more important information available. This is the reason why most websites underline and highlight links in blue. Alternatively, a link should also be a good one. There is nothing as worse as clicking a link that promises something and then takes you to something extremely different and irrelevant.
A wonderful and technology savvy website is great; however the design will be in vain if the site is not user-friendly. That is why it is important to hire the services of a web master or designer who will help make the user interface simple and easy to use.
Camden Grant is a volunteer writer for Saber Light Digital. Camden is passionate about website design and development and spends most of his time either researching on the topic or writing about it.