A Cool Site

Joanna Cox    – NYC, NY
123Triad: Web Design & SEO Company

A Cool Site

Usability on the Web is very important if one wants to have customers continue returning.   Research has shown that 42% of Web users do find what they need on any Web page. This therefore, means that 58% don’t usually find what they need.

According to this, usability of Web sites is important for one to get sales as well as make money. If ones customers can not find what they want, then they will not be buying, and the probability is, they won’t be coming back. It does not matter how innovative and new ones site is, the fact is cool does not simply cut it.

Well, one can ignore this whole article. While there is value in any study, one should test his site with his readers. Unless ones site was one of the tested sites, the results may not apply to him.

On the other hand, while these suggestions I give might not apply, they will help one somehow.

To my opinion, information retrieval is:

• How quickly and easily people find information on ones site

• More directed instead of just surfing the Web

• Becoming more important to the Web entirely.

What People look for in Web Sites

1. Graphics do not either help or hurt the gathering of information.
   Many people do feel that graphics help make the Web site more usable. Another person may feel that they make web sites unusable. Neither group is very right. According to some study, the quantity of images present on a page had no substantial effect on the information gathering  with these exceptions:
   1. Animation.
      Many users usually find animations very annoying. Animated images may have an answer to a question in it, but users simply don’t want to see them.
   2. Time of download.
      This is usually not generally an issue, except when dealing with a page which has a lot of small images as well as poor alt text. The image may have the answer, but users will navigate away before the image downloads.
2. White space usually makes sites to be less usable.

   When one is searching for information; he wants information, not fancy, artistic sites. In fact, in contrast with the accepted rule of design, the study stated that “with more white space, more users claim the site is complicated, visually confusing, over-detailed, not clear, and lacking in enticement.” In fact, in this study users felt that sites having less white space were easier to use and also had more available information.

   What does this mean?
   I think that readers who look for information want it found quickly. They do not want to have to navigate through many pages on the site just because it has a nice design which is visually appealing. The more information on the first page that they visit, the more it is likely that they are to find what they may be looking for.

3. Navigation and Content should be handled together

   A very common format for web sites at the moment is what some researchers call a “Shell Site”. These types of sites are where the navigation is first developed and the content is shoved into this particular format or shell. What the research found was that when one is looking for information, the shell sites are not easy to use. Because the links are actually the same on all navigation inside the site, they do not add anything new once they are reviewed. Therefore, when one is looking for information, the navigation shell is mostly discarded as the source of information immediately.

123Triad webdesign offers affordable custom website design. Our full service website design company only hires certified website designers. Please contact us today on 1-800-720-0816 for your next web site design project.

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