Usability and Navigation: Improve Your Site Packaging
Posted on September 10, 2007 by
Adie 
General 
10 Comments
Last week, we started talking about the packaging and formatting of sites. Here are the previous posts:
Today, we’ll talk about usability and navigation. How’s the visitor experience on your site? Is it easy to find stuff?
Highlight Your Best Content
First impressions count, so make sure new visitors can easily find your best content. If you publish new content regularly (you should), you need to highlight your best articles especially your more timeless ones.
I looked at the top 3 make money online blogs according to 45n5. (The list is great idea and linkbait, by the way.) Notice how each of the top 3 blogs highlights their best content.
1. Problogger
Cool widget on the home page:
Rotating banner above the fold that points to quality content for newbie bloggers:
2. John Chow
Popular articles section above the fold:
3. Shoemoney
Favorite posts section above the fold:
Know Your Audience
Some people have complained about John Chow’s blog design having too many ads. But his audience is internet marketers. This audience is used to seeing busy site designs with ads, email subscription boxes, and widgets above the fold.
If you’re not in the make money online niche, you probably shouldn’t use a design like John Chow’s. Most other niches have an audience that is not as online-savvy, tech-savvy, or ad-tolerant as internet marketers. In these niches, your site design has to be simpler or your visitors will get confused and leave.
Go to the other sites your target audience is visiting especially the popular and profitable ones. Then, use a design that’s similar to those sites.
Be Clear on Your Call to Action
The call to action is the action you want a visitor to take.
If you want more RSS subscribers, put your feed above the fold with a big RSS button. If you want to build your email list, place an opt-in box with an attractive picture above the fold. If you want more digg votes, insert a digg button in your content. If you want your visitors to buy an affiliate product, write a review about it. Then, in the review, cut out all the AdSense and only link out to the product.
You can have too many calls to action on any given page. It’s better to focus on a few actions or your visitors will get confused and leave. Internet users want to know what they’re supposed to do on a webpage. Help them :)
So, don’t put 3 AdSense blocks, 4 AuctionAd blocks, 20 social voting buttons, a poll, your twitter feed, and 20 technorati tags in one article. Simplicity is beautiful and leads to better conversion rates.
Fast Loading Time
Slow loading times can be caused by many things like images (too big, wrong file type), too many plugins, too many scripts running, and bloated CSS code.
For non-programmers, check out this article: 6 Ways To Speed Up Your Site.
Also, for more complex issues, ask a programmer to streamline your code to make your site run faster.
Conclusion and Feedback
Don’t ignore web usability. It will help you make more money. Your visitors will recommend your site to others if they have an enjoyable experience on your site. Also, they’ll become repeat visitors.
What other tips do you have for improving usability and navigation?
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Another great post with pointers to think about when packaging your website. I think when you look at knowing your audience, you need to look beyond savvy-ness and all that and consider age and demographics when considering your layout and such. For example, if creating a website that will primarily be targeted at the older generation, you should use larger font and stick with a simple layout, and the standard black on white, because smaller fonts will be off-putting. This is just one example and the easiest one i could think of, but there are many others in thinking of the demographics of your audience and what they are accustomed to seeing.
Great point. There is a lot to consider in site design whenever you think about your audience.
This would explain the increase in all the high profile bloggers redesigning their sites I guess. It’s obvious when you think about it though! :D
[...] it Dee Barizo at Net Business Blog has a good article covering tips for improving your site packaging. Dee has been working on a [...]
Nice points there. The user-friendly navigation tab is a must (since always).
There is always a limit as to how far you can push your web site layout with designs, John Chow’s might look filled up with ads for the new readers..but after awhile they will get used and even become curious once they will see new ads (speaking from experience). Also his site loads EXTREMELY slow even for me, sometimes it loads even slower than Yahoo right after you sign out from your email (shock). But there is still space and time for him to improve the speed load (and i have mentioned whats wrong with his layout in my blog).
Great point about having a user-friendly navigation tab. Depending your site and audience, you need to figure out what’s most important about your site and put it on that tab.
Also, great article about SEO improvements for John Chow’s new blog design.
Thanks for mentioning my blog in this post.
I’ll always be on the fence about whether blog design matters for the majority of us, but for sure agree usability trumps many things.
mark
Sidenote: How do you like that Shopzilla Publisher program. Thinking about signing up for the free $40 bonus. Do you know anything about them? or did you just place that on your side nav for funzies?
Thanks, I enjoyed that post. I will include a widget for my top posts.
Hi Jin,
The Shopzilla Link is a Text Link Advert.