05 June 2013

Transform Your Site Into A User Friendly Place To Be

By Maurine Higby


If you want to take your site to a higher level in business, then learn how to create a user friendly environment. The bottom line truth with this topic is that you'll be missing out on profits and the potential is impossible to estimate. You'll need to make all your actions based on what is known to work and be effective. Continue reading so you can learn how to gain the upper hand with a user friendly business blog.

Now that you know just a little bit, keep on going with this article and beyond because it's a huge topic.

Research has shown that navigation bars should only be in one of two places. It needs to be either along the top of the header or under it.

You may not have heard the phrase "above the fold" before but, in this instance, it refers to what a user is going to see right away when they show up on your site. This refers to what they see before they start scrolling. The above the fold space is where your most important information and page elements ought to be. This is what you want to almost force visitors to see and read before anything else. This probably seems pretty simple but a lot of websites tend to drop the ball in this area. You are going to need to evaluate just how well your site does this. If you need to redesign your home page to be better here then you should do that--that is how important it all is. Remember: the first thing you have to do is tell people what you're offering to them. It is important to prove that you are better than the competition but you already know that.

All pages of your site need to be uncluttered and very easy to understand. Unfortunately there are lots of ways that you can mess this up. Perhaps the most commonly made mistake is overdoing it on the ads. They are all trying to get your visitors to look at them. The most important thing you need to do is get people to read your site's content and that's where copy elements become so important. So master your headlines and make sure the copy you write is written for people who are going to need to scan through it pretty quickly. People who visit your site are going to scan through your copy and if you present it well, it will compel them to keep clicking and reading the other pages you've published. There is no such thing as too much emphasis upon the ease with which a person can skim through your website.

People on your home page want to know what you have for them, so put something in the way of an offer. While you should avoid making your home page full of ads like most sites do, a few tasteful teasers to good presell copy is worth trying. Aside from that, make your offers very clear and super easy to understand, but remember you can place different sidebar offers on different pages, then test that. You can offer something like a special one-time promo or an incentive to join your mailing list. Avoid GIF animations and the like, and just experiment with various designs for banners and graphics.

It is way too easy to make writing mistakes in your content and other areas of your site as well. The side panels or columns are just one good example of this. You'll have special offers and subscription optin boxes that all need to be sold in their own way. That means that it is important that your copy in these areas be as effective as you can make it. Avoid making the same mistakes that every other website owner makes, like just slapping up any old opt-in box and eBook graphic. That is what most people are used to seeing and ignoring. Placing a smaller box in the side column with some copy typed in a smaller font as well as the email field is just one way to set yourself apart. The smaller font shouldn't be too small and the copy needs to be compelling. It is important to avoid things like optimizing for user friendliness or thinking that user friendliness is a universal idea even though the concepts are often that way. You may have to apply some slight changes depending on who's in your audience. There are always exceptions to the rules and you might be able to get away with a few things that other people can't.




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