Three Easy Steps to Making Your Web Site Easy to Use

[Heather Quick]

There are three main things to consider when making your website easy
to use: typography, image loading and linking.
No matter how brilliant your website design is, if it is hard to reach
the content of your site then your site is as useful as an air
conditioner in the winter. Here are some tips to improve the usability
of your website to ensure it serves its functions optimally.
The first thing to do is to make sure the typography of your content
is suitable. If you have large blocks of text, make sure to use CSS
(cascading style sheets) to space out the lines accordingly. The
longer a single line of text is, the greater the line-height of each
line should be. It is best to keep a line length short so reading is
easier (just think 'newspapers', they always have shorter line
lengths. This enables the reader to read quickly and easily. Also,
make sure the font size of your text is big enough to read easily.
Some sites have 10-pixel-tall text in Verdana font; while that may
look neat and tidy, you have to really strain your eyes to read the
actual text.
Next, ensure that your site loads fast if you do not want to lose
visitors. Most internet users will leave a website if it doesn't load
completely within 10 seconds. So, make sure the best part of your
website is delivered to the visitors as soon as possible to retain
their attention. I know that I don't last much longer than 20 seconds.
Even though more and more Internet users switch to broadband every
year, a large portion of the web's population is still running on good
old dialup connections. It is therefore unwise to count them out of
the equation when you're designing your website, so you need to
consider loading time for dialup users.
If you own Photoshop, it will be obvious to you that when you save an
image as a JPEG file, a dialog box appears and lets you choose the
"quality" of the JPEG image. Normally a setting of 8 to 10 is good
enough as it will preserve the quality of your image while saving it
at a small file size. If you do not have Photoshop, there are many
free image compressors online that you can download and use to reduce
your image's file size.
You can also save your images in GIF format -- the image editing
software clips away all the color information not used in your image,
hence giving you the smallest file size possible. However, saving in
GIF format will often compromise the appearance of your image, so,
test the file online and make your choice wisely!
Last of all, test each and every link on your site before it goes
online. There is nothing more effective in tarnishing your
professional image than broken links, so be very careful about that.
Make it easy for visitors to find content that they want on your site.
If you have thousands of articles on your site and a certain visitor
wants to find one single article from that pile, you have to provide a
feasible means to enable visitors to do that without hassle. Be it an
SQL-driven database search engine or just a glossary or index of
articles that you have, providing such a feature will make sure your
visitors can use your site with ease.