You may have created a fantastic website with all the bells and whistles but if it is difficult to get to the content of the site, then it's a bit like making the journey to the supermarket only to find it is closed. A bit of a waste of time really. What follows is a few ideas on how you can improve some of the functions of your site to make it easier to access and use.
Put yourself in the place of the visitor. If you find yourself waiting for the site to load then you will probably not bother at all. For most internet users, anything longer than 15 seconds and they will have left the site. Make sure that your site loads quickly if you want to keep visitors. Then, in order to retain their attention, deliver the very best of what you have on your website as soon as possible.
It will undoubtedly cause you to have to make compromises, but for your website to be truly "user-friendly" you are going to have to consider those who use a dial-up connection to the internet. Although there are more and more every year who are switching to broadband, there are still a large number who are using dial-up. The biggest deal when using dial-up is the time it takes a site to load and as we mentioned earlier, if you want to keep your visitors then your site needs to load fast!So what are some of the compromises that you will need to make to increase the speed of loading for dial-up users. Generally speaking the text on a website will load up quickly even with a dial-up connection. Whereas the biggest obstacle to fast loading is having large images on your pages. It can be a fine line between having enough images to attract people and having too many so that it slows down the overall time that the site takes to load.Every image that you have on your website needs to be optimized to ensure that it loads in the shortest possible time. Editing by means of image editing software removes any unnecessary information that is on the images. This will effectively reduce the file size without affecting the appearance.
One such software package is Photoshop. When you save an image as a JPEG file you can choose the "quality" of the image. Usually a setting between 8 and 10 is good enough to save it in a small file size as well as keeping the quality high. If you don't have Photoshop, you will find image compression software free to download from the internet.There are other options available to reduce image size. These include PNG format and GIF format. GIF format, while giving you the smallest file possible will often corrupt the look of the image, so you will need to keep this in mind when choosing which one to go for. Having given consideration to how quickly your website will load for both broadband and also dial-up users, you should then think about the fact that once there, are they going to find the typography of your content appropriate? For example, if you have large blocks of text, space out the lines using CSS. The longer a single line of text is, the greater the line-height of each line should be. The size of the font is important to take into consideration too. It may look neat and tidy to have 10-pixel-tall text in Verdana font, but if you have to really strain your eyes to read the text, then it is defeating the object of having the information in the first place. You can still make it look tidy and professional but at the same time easy to read.
Once you have refined the look of your text and pages, you will want to be sure to make it easy for visitors to your website to find the content that they are looking for.Yours may be a website with thousands of articles. You need to provide workable means for visitors to find one single article from that pile without a lot of hassle. It could be as simple as an index of articles that you have, or as sophistated as an SQL-drven database search engine, but be assured that providing a feature like this will equip your visitors with the means to use your site with ease. One last thing to be careful about is making sure that all the links on your website are active before you make the site live. Just one broken link can tarnish that professional image that you are trying to create.
