Tips for Avoiding Usability Mistakes

| Thursday, September 6, 2012
By Janna Mahanna


Some of the worst kinds of mistakes you can commit with your business site are related to usability. Of course you'll need to ensure you're driving the right people to your blog, and after that it's all usability. Some are more appropriate for things like optimizing a shopping cart, or if you offer one time offers (OTO), you can implement these strategies there. Be sure to increase your knowledge in this critical area because you have to know before you can prevent usability mistakes.

Avoiding friends on your website is something that you should do in 2012, and beyond. They simply don't work anymore. The reason you don't want to use them is they affect search bots, which can affect your ranking in the search engines in many ways. If you want to have people bookmark your site and share it with others, frames need to be avoided. They won't be able to print your page either which is something that frames also prevents. If you have frames, and people use your links, they won't change colors, which can make navigation difficult. Using frames can really inhibit the usability of your website in these ways. Your only choice might be to re-code the frames on your site if you need to have them or cannot get rid of them.

Overall, you have to find a balance with what you make available to different groups of people.

There are many important reasons to avoid the use of tables, and we have talked about that in other publications. Smaller devices people have and use for surfing the web cause big issues when they bump into tables. If you want tables, then do it with CSS and you should move on to CSS anyway. There are other concerns as well such as negative effects on your ranking due to CSS being the standard, now. If you're not familiar with CSS, then it's pretty easy to learn or you can outsource. Once you see what all can be done with CSS, then you'll be a convert and never look back.

Eventually you can build up your knowledge of usability mistakes, and you will need to do a lot of study. You'll need to do a lot of testing, maybe, but some considerations are universal. Another area that many IM marketers have trouble with is properly testing or doing it at all. Be careful about copycatting because it can get you in trouble, too.




About the Author:



0 comments:

Post a Comment