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 %
