Because your potential customers may leave if you don’t.

A great Website starts with great content. However, even the best content may not attract or keep your customers’ interest if your Website lacks usability.

According to the W3C, the worldwide organization that writes Website standards, “usability is about designing products to be effective, efficient, and satisfying.”

For Websites, usability improves the user experience – making information easier to find and understand, resulting in more leads and / or sales.

Why should you care? In a nutshell, because people will leave your Website if is difficult to use. If it doesn’t answer their questions, they’ll leave. If your products are difficult to find, they won’t buy them. And, if your phone number is not prominent, they won’t call.

Regardless of whether you’re selling a product or a service, making your site usable is a key element in ensuring you have satisfied prospects and customers.

How can you make your Website more usable?

Design with consistency – A consistent header throughout your site, with prominent logo, company name, phone number, and contact link will make it easy for your prospective customers to understand who you are and how to contact you. In addition, a common main navigation, three clicks or less deep, will make all the pages of your site easy to find.

Be simple and skimmable – Web users skim pages when looking for information, products and services. Given that you have very few seconds to capture a user’s attention, it is essential that users are able to skim your pages for important information, and that the information is presented in simple and direct language. Keep industry jargon to a minimum and write in easy-to-understand sentences so that everyone, regardless of educational level, can understand your meaning. Break up long pages with headings and subheadings and pull out important information into easy-to-read bullet points.

Proofread for errors and meaning – A site riddled with misspelled words and grammatical errors is difficult to read and understand. Proofreading is an essential last step when writing. It gives you the opportunity to find not only your errors, but also to ensure that your text is conveying the meaning you have intended.

Put your important content first – Studies show that Web users view pages starting from the top left to top right, then the middle followed by the left side and finally the bottom. This may seem obvious to point out, but put your most important information in the most viewed areas of the page. That way, people who are skimming pages will see your most important information first, before possibly losing interest.

White space is a good thing – White space, or negative space, is the space between elements. Oftentimes people mistake white space as ‘empty,’ or space that needs to be filled up. However, white space fills a very important role – it allows the eye to distinguish between items and dramatically affects readability. It helps items stand out and separates them from other elements. Ultimately, white space can help improve readability while the lack of white space can destroy the readability of your Web page. If you have a lot of content, be sure to increase the amount of white space to make it easier to read.

Use proper HTML tags – The use of proper HTML tags, or semantic coding, is very important to usability for the visually impaired. Visually impaired people often rely on screen readers to read pages back to them. These types of programs cannot interpret pages well unless they are clearly explained in the HTML code.

Even if you do not know any HTML, it is possible to ensure that your Web pages are using the proper HTML tags. Modern content management systems will use the proper HTML tags if you make the right choices when designing your pages. Use the following as a guide:

• The headline of your page should always be ‘heading 1’
• Subheads should be ‘heading 2’ through ‘heading 6’ in order of importance
• The bold button should be used to highlight important words within the body of your article (not article headings or subheads)
• The italic button should be used for text that needs emphasis, like the names of publications
• Use the blockquote button instead of multiple spaces to indent text
• Use the enter key to begin a new paragraph and shift-enter to add a soft return, or line break
• Only use underlines to denote hyperlinks – most content management systems will do this for you automatically

Test your pages – Always, always test your pages in multiple browsers to ensure your page layouts look as intended. Each browser has its own unique quirks and what looks good in one may look completely unreadable in another. We recommend testing in Internet Explorer 7, 8, and 9, FireFox, Chrome, and Safari.

Likeability – All things being equal, users will follow up with, and purchase from, the site they ‘like’ the best. This is where the importance of branding comes into play… but, that is another article. ;-)