We’ve all been there before: cruising a new website, interested in the products or services that are offered, clicking around like crazy consistently failing to find basic information such as a phone number. After a minute or two of clicking and skimming content, you become frustrated, disappointed and maybe even a little disgruntled at the company and their website, so you either give up or try another search method.
No one wants to make their potential customers upset before they can even get a word into the conversation. So, making your website intuitive and easy to use adds to the enjoyment of the user’s website experience. When planning your website (and even after it has launched in the case of WordPress or another CMS) consider the following:
- Prioritize – What button or task is most important? First of all, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Now, if you were to go to your company’s website, what are the top 5 tasks you came there to complete? (Ex. find a phone number, order a product, access a customer portal, etc.) Prioritize these top 5 tasks: include them as some or all of your main pathways or use some in the top navigation or sidebar. Make your top 5 most completed tasks as easy to find as possible.
- Intuition – No, there aren’t website rules that say “Contact Us” needs to be in the upper right corner, but that’s what 99.9% of your viewers are used to seeing. Unless you have good reason, keep your website easy to use and give your users what they will expect. (This doesn’t mean you still can’t wow them with other features of your website, like great web design or motion graphics.)
- Labels – Whether it is on your top navigation, your sidebar, or even a text hyperlink within the copy of a secondary page, the words you use to describe where your visitor will go once they click could make or break their decision. Even worse if it’s buried under dropdown menus: if a button is hiding under a dropdown menu that doesn’t make logical sense, no one is going to find it. Name your buttons appropriately and put thought into what your crowd would call it. Internal industry vocabulary should be left alone and translated into layman’s terms so it will make since to your viewers.
- Widgets – If you use WordPress (which Orbit highly recommends), there are hundreds of widgets and plug-ins that you can use to upgrade your website to increase visitor usability. Whether it is a calendar app displaying your upcoming events on the sidebar of every page, a contact form that allows visitors to send a message no matter what time of night or day they are on your web, a feed from your Twitter or Facebook page, or one of the many others, widgets and apps increase the user experience and make your website more interactive.
At Orbit, we want your web to wow its viewers. Motion graphics will capture their attention, intuitive and clear navigation keeps them calm and curious while sifting through your pages, and widgets keep your web up-to-date with simple forms and feeds to enhance the user experience. Ask about our websites or the Marketing Machine Program that combines your branding, identity, website and drip marketing all in one simple package. We’ll take you step-by-step through the website process to keep it simple … Genius Simple.
Brand well and prosper
Cyndi