Website Design Content & Usability

In order to bring visitors to a website time and time again it is important to offer them extensive and valuable content that is kept fresh and uptodate.

It is then necessary to ensure that this content is easily navigated and that a user can quickly find exactly what they are looking for. The 3-click rule recommends that any page is only ever a maximum of 3 mouse clicks away.

This is best achieved by including a consistent menu within your website pages which links each of the key pages up to each other. Each remaining page will then link off from one of these main pages. As an example in this site inorder to get to this page you will have travelled from the homepage via either the sitemap or the main articles page, which is found from the main menu.

Once a main menu has been added to a website it is always important to ensure that it is positioned on every page and in the same place on each one. This will avoid confusing a user who may feel lost in their pursuit of a particular page.

Modern designs sometimes fail key usability tests in their use of a main menu. The menu can be neglected inorder to maximise a designer's scope for layingout the elements of a page, and the technology that may be employed to do it. For example menus maybe be partially hidden, reduced down in size, or perhaps all the main options only becoming fully viewable and available on rollover.

Whilst this may give a designer more room on the page to concentrate on aesthetics there will a crucial loss in the usability of the site when users struggle to move from page to page.

As well as menu issues there are also many other factors to consider in maximising a website's usability. These can include the following:

Use of consistently placed headers is a common way of helping users to understand the topic of the page they're on.

Where large amounts of content are involved it is sensible to break it up inorder to make it more readable. By separating it into separate pages users will be able to avoid scrolling pages as well as benefitting from further subsection links within the content itself.

Sometimes websites can be laiden with simply too much information which is as much a crime as failing to put in enough content. Web copy, especially on key pages, should be punchy and concise. Users should only be subjected to excessive detail if they specifically request and desire it.