3 Ways to Improve Your Site’s Usability In Under 30 minutes
Your website’s usability has the potential to make or break your business. Visitor loyalty, referrals and the general size of your audience ultimately correlates with the simplicity of your website, as well as how effectively it drives user actions. If a visitor has trouble navigating your website, they’ll probably have no issues going somewhere else. So here are a few, well 3, tips that can help improve your website’s user experience in less than 30 minutes.
Correct Page Titles
When the user clicks through to a page, it should be abundantly clear what page they are viewing. Best way to do this? Give your page a title! Place it on the top left corner of the page; make it the first thing people see. Try to avoid ambiguous titles, because they’ll just confuse the user. If you have an ‘About Me’ page, just title it ‘About Me.’ No need to go crazy.
If you’re using WordPress to run your site, this tip should be especially easy to implement. Just go to your Dashboard, click through to Pages and edit the name of the page you wish to change.
Simple Slugs
From Wordpress: “Slugs are usually a URL friendly version of the post title…. Slugs are meant to be used with permalinks as they help describe what the content at the URL is.”
Slugs allow the user to preview links before they click it. If I share this link with you: 45royale.com/blog/ you’ll probably be able to guess that it’s a blog. A simple slug takes the guesswork out of navigating links and makes your URL easier to share. Remember, usability is all about driving user actions.
Go into your WordPress Dashboard and click Edit Page. Below the page title you’ll find the page URL. By default, they should both have the same name. Leave them that way. Hopefully, the title of your page clearly describes its contents, but if not, that’s okay – you can always change it.
Optimize Clickable Content
If something can be “clicked”, it should be made obvious to the user. This process can be surprisingly difficult to refine, but there is one quick step you can take to help optimize your clickable content: Make your links look consistent!
This means they should all look and act the same, especially in their “hovering” and “clicking” states. They should also be starkly different from non-clickable text. (For example, make links bold, or a different color.) When users hover over links, give them a different color or use an underline. If your site’s links are obvious, there will be less user guesswork, which means less user frustration and a better overall experience.
Even if you’re not a developer, I would try to spend a few minutes scanning through your CSS and playing with your a, a:hover and a:visited tags. (If you’re not sure what I just said, check out this. Firebug, an HTML/CSS debugging Firefox extension, is a great way to play with your markup. Once you make changes, you can easily update your WordPress CSS by clicking Edit page > Appearance > Editor and by opening your CSS file in the right column.
For more (detailed) articles on web usability, please check out:
Author: Adam Kopec
Add your comment!
I like the point about short slugs. I’ve even seen huge blogs only usually use simple, one word slugs. Another thing that always helps is a clean template. Simplicity is king in alot of ways. Great Post!
Thanks so much! Absolutely agreed. Speaking of: http://www.subtraction.com/ is a solid reminder that is simplicity is king!
Hi -
Love your book! & thanks so much 4 this wonderful page! I’m new to WordPress & CSS & so appreciate the help. Above is my old-fashioned static website; now I’m less afraid of trying to learn how to improve it.
Btw I just tried to RT this page, & you’ve got too many characters below. I think it came out to 32 characters too many. I’ll try again…
RT @vaynermedia 3 Ways to Improve Your Site’s Usability In Under 30 minutes http://vaynermedia.com/2009/11/3-tips-to-improve-your-sites-usability-in-under-30-minutes/
Thanks again!
Joyce Schneider
Great to hear you’re diving into Wordpress and CSS! Fun to learn – tough to master.
Thanks for letting us know about the RT function. We’ll check it out!
Adam -
Nice article especially since we are in the midst a pretty sweet website overhaul.
One of the major keys is simplicity (we got over complicated on our first couple of versions) and writing your goals for the website (based on my experience).
What is the first thing you want people to do? The second? etc.
What are some of your favorite sites?
Thanks so much!
One of my favorite quotes: Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. (Antoine de Saint-Exupery) Great quote to design by.
I usually fall in love with a new site everyday: I love perusing through http://www.mostinspired.com/ and picking a few out of the batch. Some of my faves that may not be in that gallery include http://www.carsonified.com/, http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/, http://www.uxbooth.com/, http://www.designflavr.com/, http://www.psdtuts.com
What about yourself? What sites inspire you to create awesome stuff?
Love that quote. Too funny and too true.
Those are GREAT.
I like simplistic sites as well like this one.
Big fan of obviously http://www.garyvaynerchuk.com
Now I’m realizing I probably don’t visit a ton of highly inspired sites every day. I’m in the business/entrepreneur niche so a lot of time is spent on blogs, social media, etc.
Funny you don’t realize you have a short list until you have to make one.