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Your Web Presence: Usability Matters

14 August 2009 No Comment

usabilitywheelAs your home base on the web, your website is the hub of your web presence. So, you’ll probably be putting some effort into making it look spiffy and driving lots of traffic to it.

Now the question is, once a visitor arrives, how easy it for them to find what they are looking for? In other words, is your website easy to use?

Here are some things you need to take a look at to make sure that your website is usable:

Is contact information no more than one click away from the home page? The more ways to contact you provided, the better. Why frustrate a potential customer or given them a reason to doubt that you’re on the up and up?

How deep is your website? In other words, how many clicks will it take to get to the “deepest” page. Ideally, for both usability and search engine optimization, pages should be no more than three clicks from the home page.

Is your call to action loud and clear? When a visitor lands on your home page (or landing page), is it clear what you want them to do? Remember, people on the web have short attention spans, so you need to get their attention and tell them what to do swiftly.

How’s your load time? Having lots of images, large images or video can seriously affect your load time. But there are ways to relieve this, at least on the landing page. If you’d like to check your website’s load time, you can use this free online tool: tools.pingdom.com.

Can your site be “viewed” and still be meaningful by screen readers? Those who are sight impaired use screen readers to access the web. This software reads off what is on your page and when it comes to an image, it reads the “alt” tag. So, are you using alt tags with your images? And, are you creating alt tags that can be read and mean something?

Does your navigation make logical sense? Be sure to have someone not familiar with your website give you feedback on this. You are intimately involved with your website and may see things that someone new to the site would miss.


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About the Author

2

Carma Spence-Pothitt

Carma Spence-Pothitt has more than 20 years marketing and public relations experience under her belt. She has worked on campaigns for organizations such as City of Hope National Medical Center, The Marine Mammal Center and Champagne Deutz. She helps authors, speakers, coaches and other info-service professionals develop and nurture a business they love through better marketing, branding and web presence. She developed Marketing Strategies for Promoting ... You! to help authors, speakers, coaches, trainers, consultants, and other expertise-based business owners thrive.

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