We’ve all stumbled across a poorly built website. It was hard to navigate, ugly to look at, and left us frustrated. You do not want your website to be the website that evokes frustration. Your website can determine if a customer chooses to buy your service or product. Better your website with these five simple suggestions to make your website more user-friendly.

1. Organized Navigation Bar

One of my pet peeves is when websites have a disorganized navigation bar. The navigation bar is essentially a user’s roadmap to your site. It gives them quick access to important pages on your site without filtering through extra information. A navigation bar should not be excessively long. Your navigation bar doesn’t actually need to have a link to every page on your website. Instead, it should be a place to highlight the most commonly accessed pages. Pages like contact, FAQ’s, and services or products should always be linked. If you have several services you offer, try utilizing a secondary navigation bar. This way, users can still find these pages in the navigation bar, but only if they are looking for them under the main link for “Services.”

2. Link Logo to Home

Websites can be customized in a lot of different ways. There are countless ways to organize and design your site. However, there are a few things that should stay consistent on every site. It is a common practice to have your logo in the top left of the navigation bar and have it linked to the home page. If your users are mildly web-savvy they’ll expect this feature from you.

3. Content

A website needs to provide enough information without bombarding its visitors. The home page should provide some major facts about your company, maybe a few testimonials, and then links to subpages with more information. Large landing pages don’t need to be paragraph after paragraph of detailed information. Give your users the important information they need to get their answers, but leave out overly detailed information that most people will overlook anyways. Balance words with images. Users will be more inclined to look at pages that have images than pages that feature a lot of text.

4. Visually Appealing

A visually appealing website can help your website appear more credible, more user-friendly, and help keep traffic on your website. It’s important to choose a color scheme that works well. Choose a few colors that look nice together and use them consistently on your site. On each web page be sure to use a variety of formats to display your information. Utilize galleries, slideshows, charts, accordions, and other formats to keep your web pages looking fresh and interesting to look at.

5. Footer

Although the footer of your website may not be where visitors spend the majority of their time looking, it is still a part of your website that can be very helpful. This is a place to list important and common links like your contact page, FAQ’s, and common service pages. This is also a great and inconspicuous place to add all of your social media links. The footer should look the same on every single page.

If you want to explore building your website and implementing these changes, but want to have access to help as you go, you should check here.

Smartly Done Websites can help you create a website that is both user-friendly and creator-friendly. They will help you create a website you are proud of and can easily create.