A User Friendly Website

A few years ago the world of website design was concentrated on finding the best looking and flashiest design as possible. Thankfully, times have moved on and now most designers and webmasters realise that a simple design with easy navigation is what most Internet users want to see.

When designing and building your website you must ensure that the navigation is clear and the site itself is well structured. The best structure to use is one of three tiers.

The home page is the first tier with the second tier pages being the most important categories feeding the tier three pages which make up the bulk of the content.

Make it easy for visitors to find the content that they are looking for on your site. The bigger the site, i.e., the larger the number of pages, the easier it must be for a visitor to navigate through the site.

If you have thousands of articles on your site and a certain visitor wants to find one single article from that pile, you have to provide a feasible means to enable visitors to do that without hassle. Be it an SQL-driven database search engine or a sitemap index of articles that you have, providing such a feature will make sure your visitors can use your site with ease.

Allied with the ease of navigation must be the ease of viewing.

Use a good sized font and a typeface such as Verdana which is very easy to read on a screen.

Last of all, test each and every link on your site before it goes online. There is nothing more frustrating for a visitor to find an article he wants to read is inaccessible. Visitors will soon leave your website if this is the case.