Website usability is possibly the most crucial element in any web design. This is the focal factor that keeps your visitors returning to your website. Outlined below are various different points that you will need to take in to account to increase your website’s usability.

Points to take in to consideration for improving your web usability:

1.) Give your visitors what they are looking for

A visitor means business; they are seeking information and they will stay on your website only as long as they get what they are searching for. With this in mind you should only provide relevant information on your homepage that is specific to your target audience. Web logs are one of the best methods of discovering which keyword your visitor used and for what reason he could have visited your website.

2.) Inform your visitors what your website is all about

Often websites are packed full with information in no particular layout making it difficult to figure out what the site is all about! Your site should provide information about what it can offer a visitor on an instant basis. You can do this by providing relevant information on the web page. You should also provide links like ‘about us’ or ‘about this website’ for further simplification.

3.) Provide site wide links

Site wide links are pretty valuable in any website design. They allow basic navigation to all pages and minimize time spent on browsing the website or its pages. Your visitors can have quick access to what they are trying to find from any webpage using the site wide links. They also allow the search engine crawlers to index your pages quickly. Site wide links can be located at the bottom of all pages on the website.

4.) Compile a sitemap

A sitemap is the mark of a good website. Sitemaps give the layout of an entire website on a single page with all links. Creating a site map is a very important step in getting your pages indexed quickly via the search engine crawlers.  Sitemaps are perfect for search engine optimization, otherwise known as SEO.

5.) Ensure that your website loads fast

Everyone hates a slow loading website. Your visitors make decisions in seconds and it doesn’t take them long to press the back button or browse to a different website. Ultimately you need to ensure your site is quick to load to maintain your visitor’s interest.

A few causes for long page loading times are as follows:

• Excessive use of large images, custom apps, java applets, flash programs or advertising banners
• Improper use of tables, for example placing the entire page under a table can dramatically decrease performance. 
• Information overload - as a rule of thumb try to keep the amount of information per page under 75k to maintain smooth loading 
• Don't use a free or inferior hosting service; your choice of webhost plays a large role in the performance of your website.  Only use reputable hosting service providers.
• Don’t over load your pages with adverts.  While your main source of income could very well be your revenue made from ad clicks, it’s better to place your ads strategically rather then in quantity.

6.) If your site has too much content ensure readability

Poor readability will result in your visitors navigating away from your page. Poor readability often occurs as a result of the use of small fonts, bad colour combinations, long sentences, busy or detailed background images and the use of improper headings

Some tips to improve readability are:

• Implement the use of proper font size. As a rule of thumb you should only use a font size between 10 or 12 to entice readers
• Try to stick to using the Verdana or Arial fonts only and keep the font type the same throughout the entire website
• Don’t use long sentences where you can avoid it. Keep your sentences short and interesting.
• Use short paragraphs, make use of bullet points or numbers when getting your points across
• Don’t feel you need to justify your content.  Instead let your readers explore your site and make up their own minds. 
• Don’t use bold, bright or busy back ground images.  This is very distracting to readers.

 7.) Test your site before launching it to the public

Testing your site before making it open to the public is very important. You should note information like site load times, ease of navigation, information availability and reliability, content, browser compatibility etc while testing.

• Make sure your site loads in all browser types. 
• Ensure all links work correctly
• Make sure you can navigate to all pages
• Ensure all spelling mistakes are removed 
• Monitor the websites load times

 8.) Check your server log data regularly

You server log data are possibly the best information source you can use to improve your website’s usability. You weblog can give you information like keywords used most often to reach your site, website uptimes and downtimes, the pages that were most visited, exit pages etc. By studying your weblog you can find out the pages that a particular visitor accessed and the page at which he exited. This can assist you optimize popular pages and give extra attention to pages that seem to have the most exists.

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