On some days,  I am angry at the computer, actually more on the website, because things buffer, screen slows down and altogether I get “page not found”. Boom. Mind you, these are the days when things ought to be done, the boss is calling and the mind is squealing for help.  It is nerve wracking because it is not the user’s fault but who is to be blamed for this? To avoid such instances and make websites more accessible, seamless and user friendly, this essay makes an attempt to shed light on ways to make your business website user friendly. 

Making your business website user-friendly is essential for providing a positive experience to your visitors and encouraging them to engage with your brand. Some ways to make business website user friendly are discussed below  :

  1. Simplify navigation: 

 A well-organized and easy-to-navigate website instills confidence in visitors. When users can effortlessly find what they’re looking for, they perceive the business as professional, trustworthy, and reliable. This positive user experience fosters credibility and encourages users to return to the website or recommend it to others.

Simplifying navigation on business websites is vital for providing an excellent user experience, increasing conversion rates, improving SEO, accommodating mobile users, organizing content efficiently, and building trust and credibility. By prioritizing simplicity and usability in website navigation, businesses can enhance their online presence and achieve their objectives more effectively.

To simplify business websites for navigation and enhance consumer satisfaction, consider implementing the following strategies:

Clear and Intuitive Menu Structure: Design a simple, clear, and logical menu structure that categorizes information effectively. Use concise and descriptive labels for menu items, avoiding technical jargon or ambiguous terms. Limit the number of menu options to prevent overwhelming users.

Use Consistent Navigation Elements: Maintain consistency in navigation elements across the website, such as the placement of menus, search bars, and contact information. Users should be able to rely on these elements to navigate the site regardless of the page they are on.

Implement Responsive Design: Ensure that your website is responsive and mobile-friendly. Responsive design allows the website layout to adapt to different screen sizes, making it easier for users to navigate and interact with the site on mobile devices.

Utilize Breadcrumbs: Breadcrumbs provide a trail of links that indicate the user’s current location within the website’s hierarchy. They help users understand their position and enable them to navigate back to previous pages or higher-level sections without losing context.

Search Functionality: Incorporate a search bar prominently on the website to help users quickly find specific information or products. Implement filters and sorting options to refine search results and enhance user experience.

Limit the Number of Clicks: Minimize the number of clicks required to access essential information or complete desired actions. Avoid excessive layers of submenus or unnecessary intermediary pages that can confuse and frustrate users.

Call-to-Action (CTA) Placement: Strategically position CTAs within the website, making them easily visible and accessible. Use clear and concise language that prompts users to take specific actions, such as “Buy Now,” “Contact Us,” or “Sign Up.”

Visual Hierarchy and White Space: Utilize visual hierarchy to guide users’ attention and emphasize important elements. Incorporate ample white space around content to improve readability and prevent clutter. Clear and concise headings, subheadings, and bullet points can also aid in scannability.

Consistent Page Layout: Maintain a consistent layout across pages to create a sense of familiarity and enable users to quickly grasp the structure and find desired information. Consistency in font styles, colors, and spacing contributes to a cohesive and user-friendly experience.

User Testing and Feedback: Regularly conduct usability tests to identify pain points and areas for improvement in website navigation. Gather feedback from users through surveys, feedback forms, or user testing sessions to gain insights into their navigation preferences and challenges.

You could use the following templates:

  1. Single-Level Menu:
    • Home
    • About Us
    • Products
    • Services
    • Contact Us

Example: Nike 

  1. Drop-Down Menu:
    • Home
    • About Us
    • Products
      • Product 1
      • Product 2
      • Product 3
    • Services
      • Service 1
      • Service 2
      • Service 3
    • Contact Us

Example: Amazon website. 

  1. Mega Menu:
    • Home
    • About Us
    • Products
      • Category 1
        • Subcategory 1.1
        • Subcategory 1.2
      • Category 2
        • Subcategory 2.1
        • Subcategory 2.2
    • Services
      • Service 1
      • Service 2
    • Blog
    • Contact Us

Example: Apple website. 

  1. Hamburger Menu (Mobile Navigation):
    • Home
    • About Us
    • Products
    • Services
    • Contact Us

Example: Facebook website. 

  1. Tabbed Navigation:
    • Overview
    • Features
    • Pricing
    • Support
    • Sign In

Example: Netflix website. 

6.  Vertical Sidebar Menu:

  • Home
  • About Us
  • Products
  • Services
  • Contact Us

Example: Google. 

Remember, the goal of simplified navigation is to make it easy for users to find the information they need without overwhelming them with too many options or complex structures. These examples demonstrate different approaches to achieving simplicity and clarity in website navigation.

2. Optimize Page Load Times

If your pages don’t load within a few seconds, it significantly increases the chance that visitors will leave your site. Additionally, if your web pages are sluggish, that can hurt your ability to drive engagement and conversions.

Optimizing the page load time for a business website is crucial for providing a good user experience and improving conversion rates. Here are some strategies you can employ to optimize the page load time:

1. Optimize and compress images: Large image files can significantly slow down a website. Resize and compress images without compromising their quality. You can use image editing tools or plugins to automate this process. Also, consider using the modern image formats such as WebP, which offer better compression and faster loading times.

2. Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: Minifying involves removing unnecessary characters, whitespace, and comments from your code. This reduces file sizes and speeds up the parsing and rendering process. There are online tools and plugins available that can automatically minify your code.

3. Enable browser caching: By enabling browser caching, you allow the browser to store static files locally, such as CSS, JavaScript, and images. This way, subsequent page loads will be faster as the browser doesn’t need to re-download the same resources.

4. Use a content delivery network (CDN): A CDN helps deliver your website’s content from servers located geographically closer to the user. This reduces the distance data needs to travel, resulting in faster load times. CDN providers like Cloudflare or Akamai offer easy integration and improved performance.A CDN works with, rather than in place of, your host. In addition to the server that hosts your primary website, you can leverage a CDN to distribute copies of your site’s files among strategically-chosen data centers.

5. Reduce server response time: Optimize your server and database configurations to reduce the time it takes to process requests. Use caching mechanisms, database indexing, and server-side optimizations to ensure quick response times.

6. Lazy loading: Implement lazy loading for images and videos, which means that they are only loaded when the user scrolls to them. This technique reduces the initial page load time by only loading the content that’s immediately visible.

7. Minimize HTTP requests: Each HTTP request adds overhead and can slow down page loading. Combine and minimize CSS and JavaScript files, and use CSS sprites for small images to reduce the number of requests.

8. Optimize hosting environment: Choose a reliable hosting provider that offers fast servers, SSD storage, and scalable resources to handle increased traffic. Consider using a dedicated server or a virtual private server (VPS) for better performance.

9. Prioritize above-the-fold content: Load the critical content above the fold (the visible portion of the webpage without scrolling) first, so users can see and interact with it quickly. Deferred loading of non-critical elements can improve the perceived performance.

10. Monitor and optimize performance: Regularly monitor your website’s performance using tools like Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, or Pingdom. These tools provide insights and recommendations on how to further optimize your website’s speed.

To use PageSpeed Insights, simply enter the URL of the web page you want to test into the text field, and select the Analyze button:

Remember that optimizing page load time is an ongoing process. Regularly review and analyze your website’s performance metrics to identify areas for improvement and implement appropriate optimizations.

3. Implement Responsive Design

Implementing responsive design in a business website ensures that the site adapts and provides an optimal viewing experience across various devices and screen sizes. Here are some ways to implement responsive design:

1. Use a responsive framework: Frameworks like Bootstrap, Foundation, or Materialize provide pre-built responsive components and grids that can be easily integrated into your website. These frameworks handle much of the responsive design work for you.

2. Fluid grids: Create flexible grids that adjust their layout based on the screen size. Instead of fixed pixel widths, use percentages or relative units like em or rem to allow elements to resize proportionally.

3. Media queries: Utilize CSS media queries to apply specific styles based on different screen sizes. Media queries allow you to define different CSS rules for various breakpoints, ensuring that your website looks good on different devices.

4. Flexible images: Use CSS techniques to make images fluid and scale appropriately. Set the maximum width of images to 100% to prevent them from overflowing their containers.

5. Responsive typography: Use relative units like em or rem for font sizes to ensure that text scales appropriately on different devices. Adjust the font sizes and line heights using media queries to maintain readability across various screen sizes.

6. Mobile-first approach: Start designing and developing your website for mobile devices first and then progressively enhance it for larger screens. This approach ensures that the core content and functionality are optimized for smaller screens and then expanded upon for desktops or tablets.

7. Touch-friendly elements: Make sure buttons, links, and interactive elements are large enough to be easily tapped on touchscreens. Provide enough spacing between elements to prevent accidental clicks.

8. Hide or rearrange content: Hide or reposition non-essential content on smaller screens to prioritize the most important information. Use CSS techniques like display:none or visibility:hidden to control the visibility of elements based on screen size.

9. Test on various devices: Test your website on a range of devices, including smartphones, tablets, and different desktop screen sizes. This ensures that your responsive design functions as intended across multiple platforms.

10. Performance optimization: Optimize your website’s performance by minimizing the file sizes of images, CSS, and JavaScript. Use techniques like lazy loading to improve load times on mobile devices with limited bandwidth.

The amount of effort that goes into establishing responsiveness is directly proportional to the experience of the end-user. Keep in mind that users expect any website to be perfectly complementary with every single device they own – desktop, tablet, or mobile. If a website’s responsive design does not align with a certain device resolution (especially a commonly used device), the site is at risk of missing out on a segment of its target audience. Avoid this by investing time and research into studying how to make a web page responsive at the beginning of a project. (“How to create a Responsive Website”)

4.Use Clear and Engaging Content for business websites 

When it comes to creating a business website, clear and engaging content is crucial for attracting and retaining visitors. Here are some key tips to help you achieve that:

1. Know your target audience: Before creating content, it’s important to understand your target audience. Conduct market research to identify their needs, preferences, and pain points. Tailor your content to address their specific interests and provide solutions to their problems.

2. Use concise and compelling headlines: Grab your visitors’ attention with catchy headlines that clearly communicate the value proposition of your business. Use strong and action-oriented language to entice users to explore further.

Example: Ricky and Morty website

The Rick and Morty website features episodes from the latest season of this popular animated TV show, a fan art gallery, shop, and links to the Rick and Morty games and books. Besides this main content, every section contains recognizable items from the animated series as well as some hidden gems. For instance, there’s Rick’s interdimensional portal gun. When used, it briefly transports you to other worlds. This interactive project is filled to the brim with cool and quirky illustrations and animation effects that capture your attention from the get-go. These game-like touches make it way more amusing for the user and are something that all Rick and Morty fans will surely appreciate.

3. Write for scanning and readability: People tend to scan web content instead of reading it word by word. Use short paragraphs, bullet points, and subheadings to break up the text and make it easy to skim. Highlight important information using bold or italics.

4. Keep it simple and jargon-free: Avoid using technical jargon or complex language that might confuse your audience. Use clear and simple language that anyone can understand. If you must use industry-specific terms, provide clear explanations or definitions.

Example: I would like to take you through my favorite The Body Shop’s website to show you the impact of words:

5. Focus on benefits and solutions: Highlight the benefits your products or services offer and how they can solve your customers’ problems. Clearly articulate the value proposition and unique selling points that set your business apart from the competition.

6. Incorporate storytelling: Use storytelling techniques to engage your audience and create an emotional connection. Share compelling narratives, customer success stories, or personal experiences that resonate with your visitors.

7. Include visual elements: Use high-quality images, videos, infographics, and other visual elements to complement your written content. Visuals can break up the text, make the website more visually appealing, and help convey information more effectively.

Example: IKEA always presents irresistible images such that you want to buy them all. 

8. Add calls-to-action (CTAs): Clearly guide visitors on the next steps they should take. Incorporate persuasive CTAs throughout your website, such as “Buy Now,” “Learn More,” or “Sign Up for a Free Trial.” Make sure they are visually distinct and strategically placed.

9. Optimize for search engines: Conduct keyword research and optimize your content for search engines. Use relevant keywords naturally throughout your content, in headings, meta tags, and image alt text. This helps improve your website’s visibility in search engine results.

10. Test and refine: Continuously monitor your website’s performance and analyze user behavior to identify areas for improvement. Use A/B testing to experiment with different content formats, headlines, and CTAs to optimize engagement and conversion rates.

Remember, clear and engaging content is a continuous effort. Regularly update your website with fresh and relevant content to keep visitors coming back and to maintain a strong online presence.

5. Ensure Visual Consistency

Ensuring visual consistency is essential for creating a cohesive and professional-looking design. Consistency helps establish a strong brand identity and improves user experience. Here are some tips to help you achieve visual consistency:

1. Define a Style Guide: Develop a comprehensive style guide that includes guidelines for color schemes, typography, iconography, spacing, and other design elements. This guide should serve as a reference for all design-related decisions and ensure consistency across various design assets.

2. Use a Limited Color Palette: Select a set of colors that complement each other and align with your brand’s identity. Limiting the color palette helps maintain a consistent visual tone throughout your design materials.

3. Establish Typography Rules: Choose a set of fonts and define their usage across different design elements. Specify guidelines for font sizes, weights, and styles for headings, subheadings, body text, and other text elements. Consistent typography enhances readability and overall visual appeal.

4. Create a Grid System: Implementing a grid system provides structure and consistency to your layout. Define the grid layout for different types of content, such as web pages, brochures, or social media posts. Ensure that elements align properly and maintain consistent spacing throughout your designs.

5. Maintain Consistent Imagery: Establish guidelines for image selection and usage. Use images that share similar visual styles, such as color treatments, filters, or composition. This helps create a cohesive visual language and reinforces your brand’s identity.

6. Standardize Iconography: If you use icons in your design, maintain consistency by selecting a consistent icon set or creating your own set. Ensure that the icons have a similar style, size, and visual representation across different platforms or media.

7. Pay Attention to User Interface (UI) Design: In UI design, consistency is crucial for a seamless user experience. Maintain consistent placement of buttons, menus, navigation elements, and other interactive components throughout your application or website. Use consistent visual cues for user interactions, such as hover effects or button states.

8. Test Across Devices and Platforms: Ensure that your design remains consistent across different devices and platforms. Test your designs on various screen sizes, operating systems, and browsers to identify any inconsistencies or layout issues that may arise.

9. Collaborate and Communicate: If you’re working in a team, make sure everyone is aware of the design guidelines and follows them consistently. Regular communication and collaboration help maintain visual consistency across multiple designers and projects.

10. Iterate and Refine: Continuously review and refine your design materials based on feedback and user testing. Regularly update your style guide to accommodate any necessary changes or improvements.

By following these practices and being mindful of visual consistency, you can create a cohesive and polished design that reinforces your brand’s identity and provides an excellent user experience.

6. Provide Clear Feedback and Confirmation

 When users interact with your website, provide immediate feedback to let them know their action was successful. For example, display confirmation messages after form submissions or purchase completions. This reassures users and reduces any potential confusion or doubt.

7. Monitor and Analyze User Behavior

 Utilize website analytics tools to track user behavior and gain insights into how visitors interact with your site. Analyzing data such as bounce rates, click-through rates, and user flow can help you identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions to enhance user-friendliness.

In conclusion, creating a user-friendly business website is crucial for attracting and retaining visitors, encouraging engagement, and ultimately driving conversions. By prioritizing clear navigation, responsive design, fast load times, engaging content, intuitive forms, and visual consistency, you can provide a positive and seamless user experience. Incorporating effective call-to-actions, prominently displaying contact information, and providing clear feedback further enhance usability. Additionally, monitoring user behavior and gathering feedback allow you to continuously optimize and improve your website’s user-friendliness. Remember, a user-friendly website not only reflects positively on your brand but also increases the likelihood of achieving your business objectives.