Unfortunately, there are many websites that may not be considered usable and push off lots of potential customers just because it's hard to find a menu, or a product price list, or to navigate through different sections. These looking little gaps sometimes turn out to be really critical, especially for small businesses, and have no right to remain unfixed. It's great if you have worked hard on functionality, but what's the use of it if no one will like to work with the site because it's inconvenient or ugly? Any web project has to be well optimized for search engines and on the other hand it has to be very simple to navigate, clear and easy to use.

Following tips will let you know what to look at when you are testing your website for usability. It's very important that you use a smart usability approach in developing of your website before at the time of composing a technical requirements.

Content

I believe that work with any project starts with content. Content defines a web site structure, and the structure defines the way a web site will be navigated. Clear and simple navigation requires certain graphic and technical solutions. Content always shows the most efficient path to building a project.

First put all your content on a paper in a clear and logical sequence. If this is an online store, it's pretty easy to understand what comes first and what follows. On every level of your site visitors have to be absolutely sure about three things: where they are, where they've come from, and where they have to go next. Your customers have to be one click away from the page where they either find information they needs or understand what they have to do to get to this information.

You need to think like a first time visitor. For example, if your products are soaps, body wash gels, as well as candles, and you believe that soaps is one section and candles and gels is another one, don't show your visitor candles first on the page a link to which was named "body wash gels". Don't be confusing ever, because the only one confusion may cost you a huge chunk of business.

One of the mistakes is to place as much information on one page as you possibly can. Maximum number of clicks to scroll down the page containing business information is 3. Ideally, your visitor has to click only once to get to all important information in one section. If all information you wanted to give your visitor doesn't meet this requirement, you either have to split it into smaller blocks and organize sub level sections under main menu, or rewrite the block so it would have only necessary information. Ideally, all your content has to be organized in different sections according to the logic of the content structure. If different sections of your website have a cross-related content, there should be weblinks leading to that related content.

It's a good practice to put additional links to documents outside of your project. Say, if you are selling a book about Beethoven, it will be good to have a link to related documents, like an official Beethoven fan website or an article in Wikipedia. This is a good practice, because Internet is based on linking. Help your visitors to find all the best they may need about information they are looking for, and they will appreciate it.

Think as your customers, help them to find all related information or links to the information they may need on your website, otherwise they will hit a search engine and find your competitor who will have it all. Don't be afraid that if your visitors open a link from your site they won't come back. If they liked your product, and want to do business with you, as soon as they are done reading about Beethoven, they will immediately get back and buy your book. Link! But be moderate; don't let your visitors sink in the ocean of links. 2-3 related links are enough per page.

And one last thing about links to additional resources. You don't have to do it. Do it if you like it, it's a good practice, but be consistent. If you did it on one page of your website, put it as a rule for the whole project. If you don't want to have another headache of linking, just don't.

When it comes to articles, the requirement changes. An article may take a several scroll down clicks space, but if it's too long (more than 5 Word pages), it will make sense to allow a visitor to download it in Word, PDF, or an archive (ZIP, RAR) or at least to break it into blocks and publish smaller blocks on separate HTML files. It will be also good for search engine optimization, because some of search engines like smaller contents.

However, the size of a page, especially when it comes to an index page, should not be too small. Experts say, that the minimum content on the title page of your website has to have at least 250 words. (as an example, it's just about three previous paragraphs.) It's not only important for the visitor's convenience, but also for search engines indexing.

Content Appearance

The common rule you have to follow - is to make it clear to your visitors what is going on, where they are heading, and how to operate the content. It's better if all links of your website are underlined, however, for a change, you may use another ways to distinguish a hyperlink from a simple text, for example, make it a different color. What's important is to be consistent and make all links on your website look the same. It's a bad mistake to let all your links to be underlined and one of a sudden make non linked text underlined too. Or make a button like image, which doesn't have a link on it. You should not allow any type of unclear signals on your website. In other words, don't mislead your customers because being mislead once, they will get disoriented expecting the site itself to be misleading, not the image you expect them to have about your business.

Test your site for colors very carefully. Remember that your website is not only being viewed, but it's also being read. Make it as convenient for them to read it as possible: choose contrast colors for background and text, font size, which is big enough. Very important what are the main colors of the website. It's easier to read dark text on light background, so if you have a lot of content on your site, choose dark on light color scheme. Some projects with little texts, especially artistic ones, such as photo portfolios, look really great on a dark background. Then you may use light font colors. But still remember about the contrast.

Bright colors are great, and it's very good if your project is bright. However, bright colors are never either dark or light enough to make it to a good background. So, if you want a lot of color on your website, make sure that it's either a background for a light color field with dark text, or just use those bright colors as elements in design of your project. Don't forget that eyes get tired easier if there are a lot of bright colors around the text, so if your project has lots of texts, try to limit bright spots by using them in small design elements.

Navigation

Navigation is very important, because that's mostly navigation which defines how convenient it is to use your website, because using is not limited by reading, it's also finding important information and operating the whole website. According to statistics up to 95% website dissatisfied visitors were dissatisfied by an inadequate navigation.

Whenever you decide to put your menu - horizontally or vertically, - the most important thing, in fact, is to keep your menu in the same spot on every page of your site, and keep its look the same. Your visitors have to know where they have come from, where they are, and how they may get back. Your logo or a name of your company, or a web project has to link to he main page from every document of the website except the main page itself. All links leading to the document you are currently at have to be disabled on this document, it means that if you are currently in Website design section, you won't be able to click on the menu item that leads to Website design section.

Don't be afraid of creating multileveled menus. It's better to break the content into the smaller blocks and create sub menus instead of filling your pages with tons of information. If you have a long list of products in the store matching a particular search criteria, it would be very nice to allow customer to choose whether he wants to see all items on one page or divide the list into fractions, for example, 10, 20, or 50 items on one page, and design a search result page according to this module.

Regarding online stores it's a very good practice is to show some important information about the product like size and price in the search result, and then to allow visitor to view a page with a bigger image and a full description of the product. When it comes to a complicated or multileveled structure of your content, especially when search comes in place, it's very important to have a comprehensive system of links, because when you lead a customer to more than 2 steps deep from the first page, he may easily forget where he came from and how to get there.

Besides a classic visual highlighting a menu item to show the whole tree of a menu structure, which is visible on each page of a website, there is a great solution which does not require an appearance of menu tree: paths. It's a line somewhere on top of the page, which contains the whole path your customer has made from the index page. For example, he is now in the section Womens apparel, sub section Tops, another subsection Cotton on a page showing a White Short Sleeve T-shirt. The path will look this way: Womens Apparel: Tops: Cotton: White Short Sleeve T-shirt. All items in the path have to link to their parent sections, so a customer always one click away from every section he passed reaching the document he's looking at, and one look away from understanding where he is, how he got there, and how he can get back.

It's very important to inform your visitor if the link leads to the document in different format rather then HTML. It will be a good courtesy to give them a choice of downloading a Word document, PDF, or an archive (ZIP, RAR) and make sure that you let them know it before they click the link. It's especially important if link will force launching an application. A lot of users may be discouraged by the fact that you are forcing them to do what they didn't agree to. That may be a big turn off. A good addition to this type of warning may be a size of a document which is being downloaded or type of application to be launched.

Here is the example:

Usability and Navigation: How to Make it Work. Author: Natasha Chernyavskaya. © Artographica.com. Download or open in PDF, 31,1K (if opened will launch Adobe Acrobat) | Download in ZIP archive, 26,2K.

I personally don't like when a link opens in a new window, no matter if it's an internal or an external link. But no matter why you open links in a new window, warn your visitors about it.

To Splash or Not?

Some website owners like splash (intro) pages. Some are so obsessed with them so they insist on those intros to be a first page of their websites no matter what. The worst scenario it's of course a Flash or any type of movie when a visitor has nothing to do, but wait till it ends and then a link Enter a Site appears. If you have a splash like that, you may say good-buy to up to 98% of your visitors (and potential buyers!).

A moderate kind of splash is a Flash movie with a link Skip Intro that leads to the actual first page of the website. It's better, however, it will cause loosing big amount the customers as well. Researches say that no matter what your intro page looks like or says about, up to 95% visitors will leave without clicking Skip button, or finishing watching the movie, or reading the intro text if it doesn't contain any valuable information. Why having this type of intro on your website if your visitors hit Skip button anyway?

Some website owners believe that it's cool to have this type of Intro page. But, sincerely, what's the use of it? Most of these splashes are just sets of slogans like Our Company is the Best! Deal With Us and You Will Win! If your intro doesn't give any specific information about your company like what kinds of services you provide, how your client may benefit using them, how mush they cost, etc, your intro is completely useless. Even if you have all necessary information about your business in your intro, then you don't need a website. Besides, all this information has to be present on the actual first page of your website in text format anyway. So, why make your visitor read it twice?

Some of splash lovers also don't understand one very important thing: search engines can't read text you have coded inside your flash movies! And their job is to index the index page of your website. So, how they deal with indexing of your first page? They check it, find nothing and go away. Do you want the delay in putting your website in the search results in the search engines? No, you don't. Disliking splashes is the best you can do for your website.

A little bit about active content such as Flash movies with sound and any type of motion. It's a very bad idea to make your visitors listen something unless they decide to do so. Let me draw a picture. I'm relaxed at home, listening to nice music (the one I like!), navigating the net, looking for some products to buy or services to order. I click on your website's link in a search engine thinking that you may be a good match to what I am looking for and suddenly I hear in my headphones something I really don't want to hear - music or voice, it doesn't matter. Do you think I will get amazed by an incredible technology you have used on your website to talk to me? Or I will start looking for a switch to turn off the sound of your movie to be able to read your site peacefully? The easiest way for me to restore my peace is actually closing a window and forgetting about that website forever.

If you want to put some movie, interview or show on your website, you may do so. But it should not start automatically as soon as visitors open the page. You may offer them to view (or download) a demo movie, and if it's a "view". You have to provide visitors with an ability to turn it off at any time, change volume or play it again.