Website is one of the most important assets for any business. The success of your business online depends on it.

There are many factors that make a website successful. The ease with which users can use your website is one of the most important. Website usability can help boost sales and make your website a success. It helps build a loyal user-base and keeps users coming back to your website.

A usable website ensures everyone can use your website and with little effort. However, in spite of its importance, usability does not get the attention it deserves. It can be easily overlooked when designing a website.

Below are seven strategies and techniques for improving the usability of your website.

1. Use Responsive Design

Responsive web design is a new way of designing websites to provide an optimal viewing experience across a wide range of devices from desktop computers to mobile phones and tablets. Responsive Web design techniques ensure your website is easy to access, read and navigate whether you access it from a desktop or mobile device.

As more and more people use their mobile phones to access the Internet, creating a mobile optimised website has become critical to usability. Without this your website will not be available to almost half your audience.

If your current web design is not responsive, you can consider creating a separate mobile version of your website using one of the free mobile website builders and redirect mobile users to your mobile site.

2. Use Google Translate to Make Your Website Multilingual

Making your website content available in multiple languages is another easy way to improve the usability of your website and make it relevant to a global audience. It is an effective way to improve your reach. This is not just helpful for businesses that sell overseas but also if you publish content in any niche.

Furthermore, you can take advantage of free services such as Google’s free website translation tool to make your website content automatically available in over 50 languages. It is very easy to implement and can be done in a few easy steps without knowledge of programming or web design.

3. Good Messaging

Good on-screen messages are critical to good website usability. But not enough attention is put towards it. Correct on-screen messages give users the information required to use your website seamlessly and helps to avoid confusion. They also inform users of the success or failure of an action they have taken on the website.

Here are some tips:

a) Redirect users to confirmation page whenever a form is submitted

b) Display on-screen success or failure messages for user actions

c) Make Sure Messages are clear and descriptive

d) Show inline error messages for each form field

e) Use tooltips where possible

f) Use custom 404 pages that are displayed when a page is not found

4. Take Advantage of Personalisation Techniques

Personalisation is a great way to create a unique experience for your website visitors and boost the usability of your website. It makes your website more relevant for your visitors. In layman’s terms, personalisation involves offering different content to different users accommodating the differences between individuals.

E-commerce websites are already using geotargeting to improve website experience and impact sales. But the benefits of personalisation are not limited to retail businesses only. It can benefit any website. If done correctly, it can help boost loyalty and help form deeper relationships with your customers.

There are many ways to personalise a website for visitors. A simple way is via geotargeting i.e. delivering different content based on customer’s location.

Here are some tips:

• Streamline welcome messages referencing the city of the visitor
• Show different content to new and returning customers
• Change language or currency based on user’s location
• Display location specific offers and deals
• Use location to apply local taxes automatically
• Display delivery options based on user’s location

5. Make Your Website Accessible to People WIth Disabilities

Making sure your website can be accessed seamlessly by everyone including the old, blind, mobility impaired, or other disabled users is an important aspect of website usability that is often neglected. Many of these users use screenreaders to access a website.

Contrary to what some people think, it is relatively straightforward to make your website accessible. There are a simple set of web design recommendations that can help you to achieve this. The two most popular standards are Section 508 technical standards and the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines published by W3C. They recommend web design techniques to ensure that people with disabilities can use your site.

Here are some examples:

• Alternative text for images
• Accessible JavaScript
• Valid HTML and CSS Mark-Up
• Client side image maps instead of server-side

6. Make Your Website Compatible in Different Browsers

Customers will access your company’s website using a wide range of browsers such as Firefox, Safari, Chrome, or Internet Explorer.

Although web browsers are getting better and more efficient for accessing websites, differences still exists in the way each browser will interpret and display your website. This means that there is a risk that your website may appear differently to visitors using different browsers.

Making sure your website is compatible and behaves consistently across all browsers is an important aspect of creating accessible websites. There are many steps you can take to make sure your website behave as expected on different browsers.

Here are some tips:

• Test your site in as many browsers as possible
• Write good, clean HTML
• Always specify an encoding for your document
• Don’t forget to test your website in a text-only browser like Lynx

7. Test Thoroughly

Testing is an important aspect of web design that is often overlooked. Proper testing is key to creating usable websites that meet the expectations of customers. Proper testing enables a business to offers a seamless user experience on the website avoids disappointments.

There are various aspects of your website that you can test. There are many free website testing tools that you can take advantage of.

Here are some aspects you can test:

• CSS Markup validation
• Website accessibility
• Mobile compatibility
• Browser compatibility
• Broken Links
• Error messages

Conclusion

Good usability is key to the success of your website. It ensures users can access your website seamlessly with little effort. The above strategies can help you to improve the usability of your website and make it more appealing for customers.

What About You?

What steps have you taken to improve the usability of your website? Are you taking advantage of the methods above? Please share your response by leaving a comment below.