What makes a user friendly website?

Every business needs to have a user friendly web site design site that has no session time limit and is accessible to people with disabilities.

Getting a new company web site or optimizing an existing web site is an important business decision. Before you decide to let the people who designed your company stationary do it, you might first want to consider who will use the web site? That way, you're already on your way to what is called a user centered design decision!. Although it's tempting to simply get a beautiful website to impress your friends and colleagues, your customers want usable information, that is easy to find, easy to read and quickly gives them the answers they want and need. Since we use web sites too, we understand how frustrating it can be when you simply can't find information about a company you thought should find on a company site. Making mistakes is only human. On a business web site, the mistake of ignoring who will use your website will ultimately lead to website failure. We understand that you actually want to build a website that finds new customers, so we explain how to get a business website that your potential customers can find and use! Web browsers are called user agents. A browser like Internet Explorer, is called a user agent. Without a user agent you wouldn't be even able to use the Internet. Creating interoperable pages help user agents display web pages properly.

What is a user friendly website or what makes a web site user friendly?

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When you find a company website, you expect to find useful information!

In the information age, people expect to instantly find answers to every question that arises. Increasingly, the first place they search for information is on the World Wide Web. Using their favorite search engine, they know how to ask good questions and get search results pages that they expect will provide the best or most accurate answers. Since they usually start at the first listed site, they trust that it will give them the best quality information. If it doesn't, they go back to the friendly search engine results page and try to find a web site that has better information. They don't blame the search engine, they blame the business website owner for wasting their valuable time! Making a web site user friendly will give your business a competitive advantage. Providing useful information is always a good business investment.

How user friendly web site features help find new customers

The goal of every good business website on the WWW is to first attract new visitors and second, help users become new customers. For any website to retain site visitors long enough for them to become comfortable, requires that a business designer includes all the design features that make site users want to stay and see all the information. That's exactly how to find customers for a new business. Interesting page titles keep their interest.

User friendly features include:

A good site map

The most common user complaint about business sites involves site navigation. Having an accessible site map HELPS to solve some navigation mistakes. A site map is an aid to good site navigation, but it doesn't replace a usable web site menu.

User friendly website menus

There are several types of menus used on websites. Probably the most common is the Javascript drop-down menu. Although a Javascript menu can easily handle all the pages on your site, it also creates more problems than you can imagine. The only menu worse than Javascript, is a flash menu. Many users get nervous using the layered menus and search engines can't follow the links in Javascript and flash menus. Users must be able to clearly understand where a link goes, or they probably won't press it! All those cute little icons can confuse users. Clear text links create user confidence. We use and recommend simple HTML menus for every business web site. Search engines can easily follow them and rank your site higher, plus your customers easily understand and will follow them. Access keys are user friendly, broken links are not! Check your site regularly to make sure your users don't get a user friendly error message! Users trying to find information, are easily distracted and annoyed by error messages and will simply leave your site.

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User friendly, customer focused content

Every business website should be written to inform potential customers about all aspects of the business it represents. Making information user friendly seems to be difficult for many business web site designers. Technical jargon, confusing terminology and cute slogans can create a user experience that makes potential customers leave. Good web sites are about quality information. If your site has technical components, provide detailed definitions and descriptions of any confusing words used on the site.

Understanding web site users let's your users know that your site was written to answer customer questions, without ever talking down to them.

User friendly graphics, colors and font sizes

Animated graphics are definitely not user friendly. Those side scrolling banners that march across the screen can be very distracting and annoying the second time you are forced to read them! Color contrast between the print and background needs to allow users to comfortably read all the words. Color choices are very important. Small font sizes can also create difficulties for users with vision impairments.

Why design a user friendly web site for your company?

An accessible design is simply following the goals of the world wide web. Although information on every web site should be fully accessible to people with disabilities, most web designers ignore this important component. For a business website owner, accessibility features, present an image of respect for all their users' needs. The 10-20 percent of web site visitors who require accessibility features to access and navigate your web site, will certainly appreciate the exceptional customer service values you portray by providing users with easy navigation access. If you do business with the U.S. Federal Government, your web site also needs to provide minimum accessibility features. User friendly websites attract and retain more users.

Your business website needs to be a user friendly website to attract lots of visitors and be profitable. Accessibility makes your website usable by search engines and human visitors, when your pages appear at the top of the search results pages.

A well designed accessible business web site will follow the same procedure used by a good SEO. Website accessibility is actually a big part of good search engine optimization. Of all the misunderstood components of good websites, accessibility is the least important to most designers.

A fully accessible website does not exist!

To be a fully accessible web site requires that everyone, everywhere can access your business information. Considering the fact that there are more than two thousand languages and numerous dialects, translation services alone, would be cost prohibitive for any business! Although automated translation technology can allow many different languages to communicate in a common form, it's still not very user friendly.

Designing an accessible website for people with vision impairments can also present many variables. Color blindness, limited vision and complete blindness, each present unique challenges to accessible design. The goal in designing an user friendly site, is to provide every visitor with an opportunity ( using assistive technologies ) to access your web site's information. Most assistive technology requires standards compliant web pages to work effectively so you must ensure that your site validates. You might want to know: How to make a site friendly to mobile users, before you leave.

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Search engines are website users too!

Are websites friendly to search engines?

Every search engine organization advises every webmaster to design web sites for users, not search engines. Designing a user friendly business information site will impress every search engine and improve your web site ranking. Most good search optimization methods are about creating both a user and search engine friendly web site, at the same time. A good design will impress all site users and that includes search engines.

Before you decide to design an award winning website think about the web site user!

Should you find our user friendly website information useful and wish to link directly to this web page, simply copy and paste the following link text onto any of your site's pages:

<a href="http://www.seowebsitesdesigners.com/accessible_web_pages/user-friendly-website.html">User friendly sites</a>

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Internet search for more friendly information

Please note: Google does not permit direct searches from non-exclusive business sites and so they are not included on the list. Please search Google directly at www.google.com

Search multiple resources: yahoo . yahoo.ca . bing . bing.ca . alta vista . ask by pressing each name.