7 Easy Ways to Improve the User Experience in Your Website

A better website means better business. Maximizing the usability of your website means creating a site that is easy to learn and remember, efficient, sensually pleasing, and fun to use. Does your website satisfy all these demands? There are many ways to make your site impressive enough to meet your target users' expectations.

1. Show Your Credentials

Trust is tough to build, easy to lose, and absolutely vital to your website. Besides being well designed and error-free, prove that yours is not a phishing site or school project. Show that there are real people in your organization and make them easy to contact. Back up your assertions and previous work with external links. You can find more research and details at Stanford's Web Credibility Project.

2. To Have and To Hold

Remember that it takes more effort to develop new markets than to keep existing customers, and that existing customers tend to spend more money than new customers do. For better ROI, find ways to keep your existing customers coming back to your website, including news, giveaways, and online events.

3. No Mazes

The navigation should be clear and answer three essential questions of your visitors: "Where am I?" "Where do I go next?" "How do I get there?" Know what your users want and ensure that they get it.

4. Zoom, Zoom

New research has proven what most everyone knew already: people have almost no patience when it comes to the web. If you want to keep your users happy (or keep them at all), make your web pages faster than your competition. That means clever, streamlined pages. Don't clutter your pages with animations, streaming video, and images that load automatically. Include only what is absolutely necessary to get your message effectively across, and you will be rewarded with higher visitor loyalty.

5. Touchy Feely

Take advantage of the interactive nature of the web. Give them as close an experience as possible to experiencing your product or service first-hand. Engage them with online competitions, printable discount vouchers, product demonstrations, live chat, and customer feedback surveys, starting a positive dialog early. This input from your visitors also gives you a chance to learn more about them, and even to generate new leads! (See our article on How to Turn Your Home Page into a Lead Generating Machine for more information).

6. Connect the Dots

One of the few things that you can do that make both search engines AND visitors happy is linking to yourself. Links both in the text and in the navigation show the user that you have more information on related topics and ensure that they can make the most of the information you offer and can get to it easily.

7. There is No Finish Line

One huge advantage of a website is that you can measure how you're doing and make changes as you go. Never stop improving your website. Measure the number and quality of your responses - how many people downloaded your book or subscribed to your newsletter or email list? Are people not getting past a certain page? Tweak it until you are getting the results you want. Then improve it more.

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