Build a Website – Making Your Site User-Friendly

Knowing how to build a website is simple enough, but knowing how to keep your site’s visitors returning can be difficult. There are many reasons potential customers may not revisit your site. Perhaps your product or service was not quite what they needed. Maybe it was too expensive, or the shipping made it cost-prohibitive. Sometimes, the reason has nothing to do with your business or its offerings at all, but instead with the website itself.

There are many aspects of a website that have the ability to scare away prospective buyers. It’s often a good idea, once a site is completed, to have a market study performed of your site and its usability.

This will help you know if there are any major flaws that will keep your site from performing optimally by bringing customers in to buy your product or service. Without a market study, or at least a few good friends to give some honest advice about your site, you will need to take a good look at it with an unbiased eye.

The first thing you will want to pay attention to is the speed at which the site loads. Is it weighed down with heavy scripts, Flash animations, or other design elements that will considerably slow the loading of the page on older computers? Remember that not all of your visitors will be browsing your site on the latest hardware and software.

What is the overall look and feel of your homepage? Are the colors soothing and pleasing? Chances are if you have neon or other bright colors, your visitors may not stick around for very long. Psychologically, purple and yellow are hard on the eyes, and even if they are your business logo’s colors, you may reconsider creating a site laden with them. Medically, it is common for people to get migraines while reading white text on a dark-colored background, so take that into consideration as well.

When you build a website, it takes only a little common sense to create a pleasing site for your visitors. However, consider asking a consultant or some friends and family for their honest opinion. Stay away from neon colors, tiny fonts, resource-heavy graphics, and flashing pop-ups and advertising, and you will be off to a good start.