3 best practice tips for improving your site’s user experience
A company that decides to create a website to promote itself online cannot limit itself to listing its services and its products. To be successful, the web design needs to be pleasant and simple to navigate. This is why web development must consider user experience a priority. Solid user experience help make a website really useful to its users, and also improves search engine optimisation. Here are five best practice tips, drawing from the latest trends in the sector, to improve your site’s user experience!
1. The very structure of the website
This is an essential tenet of web design: websites need to have a logical structure. Presenting your products and services in a clear way will allow your user to understand what you do and why they should follow you. So focus on organizing information from the menu and the various pages. This will be specific to each website, but here are some tips for some essential ones:
- Who are you: What’s your mission? What’s your story? What do you want to communicate to your client? Make a page in which you can answer these questions
- What you do: What services do you offer? What are your skills? Do you sell products? It’s important to clearly define this so that whoever arrives at your website can have a precise idea of what you do. I suggest not limiting yourself to one page here. Instead, you can make one for all services you offer
- Your clients: Present the clients you have already worked with, especially if they are important and known. Communicate your authority and your trustworthiness to prospective clients
- Contact section: Make a page where you list all the ways you can be contacted (phone number, email, fax and even a form one can fill to message you)
2. Focus on a responsive layout
Mobiles are the present, and the future too. If your web design is focused on being responsive, you will be able to follow the latest trends in platforms, both desktops and mobile. This is also important for SEO: Google, for example, places a responsive layout as an important parameter. Boosting your SEO will, of course, boost your sales, especially if you are focusing on eCommerce.
3. Make your website light and fast
A light and fast website is the basis of a positive user experience. If your website takes too long to load, the user will get annoyed and leave. A high bounce rate is damaging to your SEO, too. So focus on your website’s speed by optimizing these factors:
- Code: Your side needs to be sleek from its base. Write as little code as possible, prefer ‘div’ blocks to nested tables, and emphasize CSS pages to simplify your work
- Hosting and server: When you choose your host, i.e. the service which will place your website on a server, you have to consider various factors. Is it better to have a dedicated server or a shared one? In case of a shared one, with how many other websites will you have to share your space? What’s your budget? Of course, a dedicated server is better for speed but will cost more. An ideal solution is to keep in the middle – get a server you share with a few, select websites, which won’t slow down your navigation
- Images: to optimise page speed and improve usability, you have to be very careful about the images you use. Reduce their weight, call them with a pertinent title and you Alt tags appropriately, in order to make them useful in terms of search engine optimization
- Cache: to reduce navigation time in your website it will be useful to exploit browser caching, so that next time you visit the resources will come from the user’s hard disk rather than your site’s server.