Website Usability Consulting Services
One of the most important facets of your website is its usability. In other words, can customers find what they need? Do they arrive where they expected when coming from a search engine or ad? Is their experience a pleasant one or something fraught with aggravation and trouble? Essentially, anything that impedes your customers or the flow of traffic is a problem, and you certainly could benefit from Lodi Commerce's website usability consulting services.
What Does Website Usability Consulting Services Entail?
- Identifying and repairing broken links
- Creating accurate redirects for pages that are outdated or have been changed
- Developing a site navigation structure that makes sense to users and quickly directs the flow of traffic through the website
- Creating a properly categorized sitemap that aids users in finding what they need
- Building accurate databases that return real information when searched, and backends that are working, free of connection errors
- Integrating e-commerce solutions that ensure safety, and make customers feel comfortable when using their credit cards and bank accounts to make payments
- Ensuring acceptable page load times so that visitors are not forced to leave prematurely
- Coding the website so that it is accessible to the visually impaired. All graphics and active links should clearly display meaningful ALT and TITLE tags.
- Employing fonts that are easy to read and using colors that blend
- Understanding that white is the preferred background color with a traditional link color such as blue. Further, links should be the same throughout to maintain consistency and so as not to confuse visitors. Also, visitors need to easily recognize what links are clickable.
- Realizing the importance of good quality graphics, and proper spacing of the information provided.
- Avoiding "fancy stuff" that does not produce sales. For example flash and fads-of-the-day
- Writing and installing custom 404 messages
- Designing a company logo for branding and ready identification
- Writing an "About Us" summary
- Finding the right mix of advertising and content
- Writing content with concise headlines
- Writing content that is relevant to the site
- Arranging content in a readable fashion using bullets where appropriate, enough white space to break up blocks, and properly formatted paragraphs for easy skimming.
- Designing a home page that is free of noise and clutter, and one that presents an excellent and succinct introduction. Think about the expression "judging a book by its cover".
- Ensuring link structure is logical and creating meaningful URLs in the form of real words, not numbers and question marks.
- Reviewing your analytics to determine the pages from where users are leaving and to determine your "Bounce Rate".
- Establishing a "Call to Action"
- Conducting code and website validations
Basically, website usability has to do with two notions:
- keeping visitors on the website for as long as possible, and
- efficiently converting traffic to paying customers, or at least achieving a desired goal such as users submitting email addresses.
Believe it or not, it is easy to attract motivated users. The key is what you do with them that counts. Problems generally occur at the website level because website managers do not know what to do with the visitors. They send them to the wrong pages, they make the checkout process long, confusing and tedious, and overall they make the shopping experience unpleasant, leaving potential customers questioning what the heck is going on. As a result, companies wonder why their sales numbers are so poor.
In order to identify problems and specific areas that require improvement, the first step that Lodi Commerce takes, as part of its website usability consulting services, is to perform a Professional Usability Test. Actual people use the website in an attempt to perform common functions. Then we document their feedback along with the technical issues that arise during the testing, and once we understand the obstacles that hinder your customers' movements, we can develop a plan to resolve the issues. Ultimately, you will notice the difference rather quickly, as increased sales should be readily evident.
Finally, website usability consulting services help to ascertain whether your present technology integrates well with your customers' expectations.