In this installment of my Website Usability series, we will discover components and pages that can enrich your site and make it more user-friendly.

Occasionally, you might have visited sites that were “poor” in terms of their components. So what was missing? Possibly a number of things.

Some sites lack their own title, slogan, and logo— these elements are a must-have trio. You want to let people know your brand’s name, your organization’s motto, and your brand-recognition element, or logotype. Include this component somewhere on the header of your site.

For businesses selling something online, obtaining personal details, or offering services, the law sometimes requires a Terms and Conditions component. This page will also help protect your online business from misunderstandings on the part of your customers or website guests. A Privacy Policy component is also highly suggested. You can include these two components as small but visible text links in your website’s footer menu.

If your site’s material is fully or partially copyrighted, you might want tell your visitors. Include the copyright information in the bottom menu—it usually looks like a copyright sign (the letter “c” encircled ©)—and your site’s official name right after that. You might want to include the years the copyright is active, for example “2006-2008.”

We’ve already talked about it before, but it wouldn’t hurt to remind you about sitemaps. You really want your visitors to know your site’s structure, and a sitemap will definitely help them find the pages they need.

Another “must” for content-rich sites is a search feature. It should be placed in the visible area above the fold, and should be easy to use and work properly. Some sites are using free search forms provided by major search engines, which might be a good idea if you can’t build a simple search engine in-house. If the site has a large number of pages in different formats, styles, categories, and segments, you can add an advanced search function whereby people can search by subject, author, date, category, format, etc.

It makes sense to tell your visitors about your site or who is behind it. That is why many reputable sites have the component called the About Us page. This tells about the site and/or its owners, thus showing your openness to the online public.

Another feature that shows your openness, and also helps your site to be user-friendly and meet website usability requirements, is the Contact Us component. This can be a simple feedback form. You can also add your physical address, phone numbers, email addresses, etc.

By the way, there is no need to hide your email addresses under images. Instead, use spam-filtering software with your email clients and for your website from the hosting platform. It is also ideal to give your business address and phone number(s), if you are fine with people calling to ask questions. It will show your visitors that you have nothing to hide and will make them comfortable to do business with you.

You can include those last two components in any visible area of your site (homepage and all other pages); they usually are located next to each other.

If you sell products or services, a very good idea is to have a live chat option available on any page of your site. This makes it as if your visitors entered the real-life office of a reputable organization—there always someone to talk with who can help them out.

You can also add a report broken links component, so that your visitors will be able to help you make your site better and free from errors.

Finally, it is a great idea to add a custom 404 error page (“page not found”). Here, you can include that report link. The custom 404 page will help you not to lose visitors.

In general, the more interaction features you add to your site, the better. Just make sure it’s not annoying. Pop-up windows screaming “Wait!” when someone is trying to leave the page might be very distracting, and thus harm your site rather than help it.

If you follow my above suggestions on website components, you will make your site more user-friendly, and benefit from that effect.

Shavkat Karimov
Internet Marketing Manager
mobileStorm, Inc.
Every problem comes with a solution
SEO Ranking Examples

When it comes to web content, some things are obvious:
- It should be free from misspellings, grammar, or factual mistakes;
- It should be easy to understand, interesting, and not boring.
- It needs to be SEO-friendly.

However, from the website usability point of view, the content must be first of all useful! And there are other things needed to meet website usability best practices and standards.

Content Look and Formats
You should present your content in a popular web format that doesn’t need to download any additional applications. HTML formats are best for this purpose. While PDF documents look good, they might require readers to take additional steps if they don’t have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed.

The content of your site should be easy to read. Don’t make the font size too small or too big. You might want to let visitors choose the text size they prefer via a short and clear message in the header or footer of your site—many sites do this.

Avoid using bright colors in the text. They just annoy readers.

I personally don’t like “negative-colored” sites—those with a dark background and light text. They can make one’s eyes hurt when one goes to other sites with the usual light background and dark text, since these look too bright after visiting dark-colored sites.

Your visitors should be able to understand, on the spot, what a web page talks about. So the key elements of your content should be somehow outlined. Make them bold, underline them, or create headlines with larger text sizes (or by using the H1, H2, or H3 tags). We will talk about these and other tags later, and also discuss the CSS stylesheet that you can use to make your content look good.

Content Organization
The content on your site should be well-organized. You should do the following:
- Put the most important parts at the top of your content section.
- Group related parts together, helping readers to understand content more quickly and easily.
- Get rid of anything unnecessary.

Content Structure
You might want to divide your content into sections. Reading sections of text when they are separated is much easier than when everything is crowded together. Separate content sections by topic and add some design elements. For example, a good CSS layout style with barely-seen grey window limits would work great.

Try to provide visitors with the convenience of being able to read everything with less page-scrolling and fewer clicks.

People perceive information differently, so know your visitors and present your content the way they would want it to be presented.

Use lists and tables to structure your content like I did within this post. It helps readers to obtain the information in a more convenient way.

Structure the content with logical and easy-to-use sub-menus that are easily seen from any point of the content’s screen. Make sure that readers understand where they are within the content, where they can go next to find out more, and how they can go back to what they already read.

It is a good idea to interact with your audience. Ask questions and let them answer by adding a feedback form right below the content part of the page. Create polls if needed.

Finally, try to include introduction and conclusion statements to your content where possible. Sometimes it helps to read these two sections to get the picture.

Hope this helps you making your site’s content more user-friendly.

Shavkat Karimov
Internet Marketing Manager
mobileStorm, Inc.
Every problem comes with a solution
SEO Consulting Services

Simplicity is key when it comes to navigation. The more simple it is, the better. Your main task is to make sure visitors aren’t lost on your site.

Navigation should be available on each page of your site. The visitor should be aware of where, exactly, he/she is located on the site at every moment. The visitor should also know from which page he/she came, and where he/she can go next.

Website navigation can be placed anywhere on the site as long as it is extremely visible. Most sites put navigation on the left or right panel; sometimes, or additionally, it can be placed in the site’s header or footer. The point is that the navigation should always be at the same place. This will ensure that your visitors aren’t lost, and will know where to look for directions.

Don’t think your sitemap can replace navigation. The difference between these two is that a sitemap is just a page containing a list of links to all the pages of the site, while navigation something that is on all the pages (or at least the major pages) of the site.

It might be a good idea to create dynamic navigation that is not just repeating itself everywhere. Instead, while the visitor is on some sub-page, the navigation shows the neighboring same-level pages, as well as the main sections of the site. This will require additional technical skill and work, but will make the navigation of your site more useful and less boring.

People shouldn’t have to guess where they’ll go if the click a certain link on your menu. The titles of these items should be clearly stated. Make sure your navigation links looks good by using a Cascading Style Sheet (CSS). We will discuss CSS later.

In the next post we will talk about a website’s content. Until then,

Shavkat Karimov
Internet Marketing Manager
mobileStorm, Inc.
Every problem comes with a solution
Consulting by SEO Manager

While the homepage is your website’s face, the layout is how it looks. You want your face looking good, right? Let’s see how we can make this happen. We have already talked about design and content, and will discuss their sub-elements in upcoming posts. So today I’ll concentrate on the visual essentials of your website’s layout.

Layout basically consists of four visual parts: Header, footer, right-side and/or left-side panels, and a content section. Each of these parts should state their purpose.

You should take into consideration things that are different for each of your site’s visitors:
• Screen resolutions, and how your layout will look in different resolutions (I’ll go into this further in a future post).
• Which web browsers the visitors are using, and how the site looks in each major web browser (also to be discussed in detail later).
Ideally the site should look, and function, the same on any screen or web browser—but unfortunately, in most cases this just isn’t possible.

Place the most important things above the fold, i.e. on the top part the page that can be seen without scrolling. It is fine if some other elements are placed below the fold and the visitor has to scroll down to see them—after all, if there is no need to scroll, the page might be too short.

It is a great idea to work with a “templatized” site. By this I mean that the templates of different sections can be easily edited, removed, or added without affecting the general structure of the site. Most of today’s websites are created that way, both custom-built sites and those using content management systems (CMS). It makes the editing work much easier when your site is structured by elements combined together. It also ensures that your layout stays the same no matter how many different changes you are making to any section of your website.

Do not use too many graphics on your site. Texts and images should be laid out in natural proportions. Look at your favorite sites to decide which proportions will work best for your web pages.

In the next post we will talk about your website’s navigation. Until then,

Shavkat Karimov
Internet Marketing Manager
mobileStorm, Inc.
Every problem comes with a solution
SEO Manager - Consulting