If you want a website that is extraordinarily easy to use and delivers results, then all you have to do is view your site from the perspective of your target audience.

As simple as this sounds it is amazing how many bad websites exist today because they don't follow this simple procedure. Companies spend thousands of dollars trying to lure visitors to their websites and what happens when the visitors arrive? They are unable to navigate through the site and go running away to the competition!

Start by writing down a list of all the unique user groups that your website targets and then imagine visiting the website from each users perspective. Write down the step by step process they will take to navigate through your website, learn about your products and services, and deliver your desired response.

We'll cover this process in more depth in the Sales Process section, but for now let's discuss the major usability issues that severely hurt website usability: Browsers, Screen Resolution, and Typography.

Browsers

Designing a website used to be simple. If you built your site to work on Internet Explorer and Netscape then the majority of web users could use your site. Those days are long gone. Internet Explorer is still the top dog, but there are now 5 browsers of significance: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla, Safari, and Opera.

To make matters worse, these browsers update to new versions every 1 to 2 years, causing webmasters to frantically tweak and adjust the sites to function correctly when the new browser versions become available.

Browser Testing Recommendations

If your website has not been tested within the last year, then it may no longer function correctly in all the major browsers. You should test your website in the following browsers:

Internet Explorer 6 and 7
Firefox
Safari
Mozilla
Netscape

According to http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp, the most recent browser usage stats are the following:

Internet Explorer 7 = 22.0 %
Internet Explorer 6 = 30.7 %
Firefox = 36.5 %
Mozilla = 1.1 %
Safari = 2.0 %
Opera = 1.4 %

Screen Resolution

The best advice on screen resolution is available from usability expert, Jakob Nielson. He says to optimize for 1024 x 768 and to make your site “liquid” so that it stretches for any resolution. You can view his detailed advice at this link: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/screen_resolution.html

Note: Screen resolution is widely debated and as with most things in web design it depends. :)

Typography

Fonts and Sizes: The font and size of your website’s text will greatly affect your customers’ ability to read and understand the contents of your website.

Font and Size Recommendations

Fonts – It is best to use a website font that is standard for everyone’s computers and that is easy on the eyes. The following fonts are commonly used web fonts:

Aerial, Times New Roman, Trebuchet, Georgia, and Verdana

Size- Jakob Nielsen is the Usability Guru for websites. These are his “Readability Guidelines” for Website Font Size:

  • Do not use absolute font sizes in your style sheets. Code font sizes in relative terms, typically using percentages such as 120% for big text and 90% for small text.
  • Make your default font size reasonably big (at least 10 point) so that very few users have to resort to manual overrides.
  • If your site targets senior citizens, use bigger default font sizes (at least 12 point).
  • If possible, avoid text that is embedded within a graphic, since style sheets and font size buttons do not have any effect on graphics. If you must use pictures of text, make sure the font size is especially large (at least 12 point) and that you use high-contrast colors.
  • Consider adding a button that loads an alternate style sheet with really big font sizes if most of your site's visitors are senior citizens or low-vision users. Few users know how to find or use the built-in font size feature in current browsers, and adding such a button within your pages will help users easily increase text size. However, because every extra feature takes away from the rest of the page, I don't recommend such a button for mainstream websites.
  • Maximize the color contrast between the text and the background (and do not use busy or watermarked background patterns). Despite the fact that low-contrast text further reduces readability, the web is plagued by gray text these days.

For more comprehensive information on website usability, visit Jakob Nielsen’s website at http://www.useit.com

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Website Sales Process
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