Check your web design’s usability

As a programmer I hear a lot about how we need to make our sites and  features usable.  “Usability” can have a different meaning to every other person.  To some, usability can mean making sure the site layout is not a mess or the graphics make the site look pretty.  Others have more critical meanings of usability such as an “Add to Cart” button working or the shopping cart not having errors.  The fact that usability can have so many meanings is proven when you view this “ultimate web design usability checklist“.

Creating an informational web site or E-commerce store is much more than throwing a bunch of code together and hoping for the best.  At Solid Cactus our programming team tries to standardize our code as much as possibly once it has been tested and goes through a usability checklist.  Usability to us means every aspect of the site works as expected for everyone and everything that tries to use it. Usability needs to be checked for user interaction as much as search engine interaction.

If your web site has not been overhauled in a long time I recommend taking some time to pick out important pieces of that “ultimate checklist”. Look through your site and see if the result is acceptable. Here are a few questions you can ask yourself while going through your website:

• Do your Title, Keyword and Description Meta tags display information dynamically per page?
• Does the font size of your content make reading easy at different resolutions?
• Is your navigation easy to follow without cumbersome functionality?
• Is the content in an easily digestible layout?
• FILL IN THE BLANK…

The key to the success of your web site is ensuring the usability pieces are all in place. Once you go through your web site have someone else that is not so familiar with your site go through. Chances are they might find things that you overlooked. Compile a list of any concerns and get them resolved. With so many sites joining the web each day you can not afford to have an inferior web presence.