Check your site navigation, the ratio of adverts to useful content and use different browsers to identify usability problems.
- Navigation
Do visitors find your site easy to navigate? A common mistake that website owners make is to assume their site is easy to navigate, without realizing that they designed the site around their own needs and then spent a lot of time tweaking it. To them, the navigation feels as comfortable as favorite pair of shoes.
This means the navigation might be obvious for you but not to the new visitor.
Take time to detach yourself and imagine how a newcomer would be trying to navigate your site. Better still, ask someone who’s not familiar with your site to find specific information. Get them to think aloud as they do this, so that you can see where confusions arise and why.
Difficulty in navigation is one sure way to drive visitors away and hand them over to another, friendlier, competitor website.
Tip: Add a sitemap
A sitemap is a navigational tool that also helps put your site high on the list of search engine rankings. Guide visitors in a tour through the site and teach them how to get from one point to the next with the use of this visual aid. Visual aids support navigation and are a great way to bring users directly to the page where the merchandise is chosen and on to the next to complete the purchase.
- Too many adverts
Too many adverts is more of a turn-off than a sales-generating feature. Aside from taking up valuable site space, they give your pages a cluttered look which may discourage visitors who want a clean and structured presentation.
Also, too many adverts compared with useful content gives the user the impression that the site owner cares more about making money than providing a useful online service, and inevitably creates a poor user experience.
You’ll know the sort of feeling this approach creates if you think back to the sort of person you meet at parties who only want to drone on about themselves with their “me, me, me” style. It’s annoying when they choose not to have a meaningful two-way conversation with you. Filling your site with adverts is the online equivalent.
Tip: Ask yourself is your site offering enough useful information to appear credible enough for visitors to act upon your calls to action to buy.
- Browser Compatibility
It is implicit that the design of your site must be capable of accommodating the mainstream browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari as well as the new and alternative ones like Google Chrome and Opera. Thus, after designing your site, put it through a trial navigation run and use all the functions that would normally be done by clients of each browser type.
Check for problems with pages loading or operating properly and see if visuals, graphics, animations and links function accordingly.
If your site does not function on the major browsers, this is the equivalent of a death knell and you’ll be losing potential customers. What’s worse is that this happened just because you didn’t bother to spend a few minutes clicking round your site in different browsers.
Tip: Validate your code
Validated code is more likely to display correctly in a variety of browsers. Run your code through a free online validator.
