Hi Publishers!

The most basic and crucial rule of thumb to creating a successful website is to ensure that visitors have a positive experience when navigating through your website. Here are three quick tests to see if your website is user-friendly. Go on, try them out!

1. The Beginning-to-End Clicking Test

While it is great to use categorical tabs and sub-tabs to separate and organize your content, you should always minimize the number of clicks from the homepage to the ending page. Each click that is placed in between the start to the destination page is a filter and many people give up before reaching the end. Conduct a beginning-to-end clicking test by putting yourself in the shoes of the visitors; think of a specific piece of information that you want to learn from your website, then check and see how many clicks it takes for you to reach that webpage. Remember, the more clicks it takes, the least likely visitors will see that info.

2. Insights from an Outsider

No matter how fancy or professionally sound your website is, it is useless to your visitors if they fail to navigate through your site or to understand your content. It is easy for you to lose sight of how effective your website is when you’ve been working on it for so long. Hence, you should seek the opinions of an outsider – someone who did not participate in the process of creating your website. Can they find what they are looking for? Are the buttons located at the right places? Are the font sizes too big or too small? Is the wording easy to follow? Is there too much text and not enough pictures?

3. Checking Each Link and Webpage Regularly

I can’t begin to tell you how frustrating it is to go through the long and tedious process of trying to find specific information on a website, and discover an error page after finally finding the link to that page. Not only will the visitor have a poor experience and probably never come back again, you have also left them with a bad image of your company. Having broken links and pages that do not load on your website is unprofessional. You can avoid this by frequently checking each button and landing page.

So did your website pass the test? Do you have any tips or practices that you follow to enhance your website?

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