Today we’re continuing the discussion on technical elements of website usability that began in my previous post.

One more important technical question: How does your website load? If it doesn’t load fast, research why not. Internet users don’t wait for sites to load—they just don’t. The average user doesn’t spend more than 30 seconds on a website.

With a regular broadband connection, the average site’s homepage should load within 10 seconds and its internal page should load within 15 seconds. You need to make sure your site meets these requirements. There are lots of ways to ensure this.

The code of your website should be clean and free from errors. Always validate it through http://validator.w3.org and if you use cascading style sheets (CSS)—which you should be—
validate them at http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/. Thus, you’ll be confident that your website is W3C compliant.

Your code should also be “light”—don’t use anything that might make site’s code “heavier.”

Make sure that uncommon plug-ins are not required to view elements of your site, otherwise the website will be very uncomfortable for your visitors.

Avoid dynamic URLs. Use the .htaccess file’s rewrite mode to make sure all of your site’s URLs are SEO-friendly, i.e. static and keyword-rich. Consult your hosting company and hire a programmer to do some customization work for you if you don’t know anything about how to implement this.

Test, test, and test! Test it in all web-browsers (Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari); with both PC and Mac; with mobile phones and other Internet-access stations; with different screen resolutions (1024×768, 1280×1024, 800×600) and color schemes; when using additional online tools and add-ons to view the site; and how it would be seen as a screenshot or in a frame. Also ask yourself, “How does the site perform for visually impaired users? How are DHTML menus working? Do flash or action script elements load fast?”

You can’t make your site look technically perfect for absolutely everyone, but you should try to do your best.

Collect information from your visitors. You can do this automatically by using different sorts of web analytics tools like Google Analytics; or by using different marketing strategies, such as offering free products (white papers, software demos, etc.) if visitors fill out a simple contact form. Ask them website usability questions, such as what’s easy and what isn’t. The more you know, rather than assume, the better you can make your site look and function for all visitors. In addition, using web analytics is vital for other purposes. You should be aware of what’s going on with and on your website, so you can act fast when something is wrong.

Hope this information helps in creating and managing technically strong websites. Good luck!

Shavkat Karimov
Internet Marketing Manager
mobileStorm, Inc.
Every problem comes with a solution
Business Portal and Directory

We are not going to get too technical today, since many readers might not be so knowledgeable about web programming. But I’ll offer some guidelines that you can keep in mind when working with your website developers.

As a universal principle: Make sure everything works as planned in all the major web browsers.

First, determine your servers’ capabilities. Do you have any bandwidth limits? Bandwidth is another term for website traffic, operational as well as “coming from” or “going to” activities. What is the cost for extra bandwidth every month? How much web space do you have with your hosting package? Are these enough for your website function and load fast? What operating system do your servers use—Linux, Unix, Windows—and is it the best option for your site? Are there any pre-installed scripts and content management systems that you can try? Are there any limits on using certain types of scripts and tools (CGI, rsync, SSH access, wild cards)? Do you have access to the server logs, and stats to analyze your website traffic sources, visitor types, and other useful data?

Keep your website’s major files in the root directory of your server. This is really good for both WU (website usability) and SEO. Place the codes in separate files for security reasons, and also for SEO purposes. If you use Java scripts, make sure they are not placed in the same file of the page; just add a code snippet, which will call the script from another file for execution. When it comes to SEO, this technique of placing everything separately will not only let your website function faster, but will also give you a bit of a search engine ranking advantage.

Website security is a critical issue, and you need to use secure web servers. You should password-protect your major back-end files and directories. Also, back up your website files and databases periodically. Do multiple backups. Control your site’s traffic and try to note anything suspicious. Keep your own computer free from Trojans and viruses. Don’t allow people whom you don’t fully trust to access your computer. Be in constant touch with your server’s support people and warm them right away if you notice any danger to your website.

Do not assume that all users will have the same browser features, or will have set the same defaults. Some users select larger fonts, and some users may turn off backgrounds, or use fewer colors. You should find out what settings most of your visitors are using. You can do this by analyzing your website traffic. You can also specify on your site what browser, resolution, font size, etc. with which the site is best viewed .

Lots of Internet statistics can be checked here: http://www.thecounter.com/stats/

You also need to use a set of webmaster tools by Google, which can be found at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/. These are free tools to diagnose your site and better optimize it for Google, set parameters, and generate statistics. They can be very helpful in making your website technically friendly.

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

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