Does Your Website Have What Your Visitors Want? - More Usability Factors
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Talking about a website's information architecture leads almost naturally to navigation. On this point, what is good for search engines is also good for your visitors. Arrange your site so that broad category pages lead to narrower topics, but that, at worst, you never need to go more than a couple of clicks from the home page to get to anything. Make your navigation systems really obvious: use site maps, alt tags for image links, and bread crumbs so that visitors know where they are.
A bread crumb, in case you didn't know, usually appears near the top of a web page, and provides links back to each previous page that a user traveled through in order to get to that page. They look like this: homepage --> section page --> sub section page. Like the proverbial bread crumbs from fairy tales, they exist to help prevent your visitors from getting lost. Also, make sure the anchor text for each of your links is well written, so that visitors will know what they are going to get if they click on a link. Making use of good navigation standards on your website will make it incredibly more usable.
How functional is your website? When a visitor clicks on a link to submit a form or use a tool, does it work? Or does it return an error? What if the visitor is using Firefox or some other non-Microsoft browser? How about if your visitor uses an Apple or Unix-based operating system? Do all of your images load properly? You need to think about these things, so that your site visitors won't have to. Remember, they won't want to think about these things; they'll just go elsewhere. If you want them to stay, make sure everything on your site works the way it is intended.
Related to the issue of functionality is your website's accessibility. Having a functional website means that everything works the way it is intended; having an accessible website means that it is easy to get to everything. That's a major consideration if you expect to serve a lot of disabled or impaired visitors (for example, blind surfers who use special readers to help them navigate the Internet). For both functionality and accessibility, you need to limit coding errors as much as possible, check links regularly to make sure they aren't broken (and fix them promptly when they are), and make sure your site's content is accessible and visible in all browsers without forcing your users to do anything special to see it.
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