What Makes User Friendly Websites?
By Joel Black on 07/21/2014
The foundation of every online marketing campaign is the website. Setting up a website is imperative in order to set in motion every other marketing strategy, whether it’s an SEO strategy, a social media strategy, a content marketing strategy or more. However, companies that don’t have user friendly websites are going to fail right out of the gate.
So what makes user friendly websites? The following are a few things that are essential for setting up user friendly websites:
Website Speed
User friendly websites don’t necessarily have to exhibit incredible loading speeds, but they can’t have slow loading speeds either. If it takes the website more than 4 or 5 seconds to load, the visitor will most likely hit the back button. A slow website is a sure way to lose visitors almost immediately. Not only should the homepage load quickly, all other pages on the website should as well. The best way for a company to ensure that their websites load quickly is by making sure to get a good web host that offers plenty of bandwidth.
Website Layout
The website needs to be easy to read and to navigate. Many companies make the mistake of trying to make their website design flashy, which often slows down the speed of the site as well as making the visual design look way too cluttered and unprofessional. Every page should be easily accessible as well. For example, if the visitor wants to purchase a product or service, then the e-commerce page should be easy to find and navigate. If it isn’t, the company could end up losing sales since visitors will simply leave without making a purchase. Many companies will implement a search function into their website in order to make it even easier for visitors to find what they are looking for.
Broken Links
There’s nothing more frustrating for a visitor then clicking on a link that the company has provided on their website that doesn’t work. Broken links are very unprofessional and make the website seem outdated. Companies should go through their websites in order to check for broken links on a regular basis. Broken links not only frustrate visitors, they can also damage the website’s search ranking since Google’s algorithm punishes websites with nonworking links.
Mobile Friendly Pages
User friendly websites need to be mobile friendly as well. It’s estimated that by next year, almost 50 percent of all web searches will be conducted on a mobile device, such as a smart phone or a tablet. These visitors will often do searches for products or services while running errands, and companies that have local locations need to make sure that their websites are mobile friendly in order to draw in visitors such as these. Just because the website is perfectly designed and loads quickly on a home computer does not mean that it will translate as such to a mobile device. Visitors won’t want to be scrolling up, down, left and right through a website in an attempt to read the content.
Provide Contact Information
Companies that don’t have their contact information clearly visible on their website are seriously hurting themselves. Visitors with questions about products, services or anything else, will want to contact the company somehow. Contact information should include a phone number, an email address and a physical address if one exists.
These are a few of the things that make up user friendly websites. Setting up user friendly websites is integral to get visitors to return in the future, not to mention to keep them from leaving the site.
