Of course you’ll need to do more than the next guy to produce a business site that is very user friendly. This is where so many inexperienced IM marketers make many mistakes because they are not aware of all they need to know, or they just don’t do it. Along with this you must have proper behavior tracking in place so you can measure results. Ramp up your results on any business site by learning the following user friendly tips.
There is all sorts of research that proves that there are only two good places for navigation. You’ll want to have it either across the top just under the header graphic.
The only other good place is on the left hand side or in the left column in the layout. The area to avoid is the right handed side of your site. This means that either you can build a website that is two or three columns big. If you choose to go with a three column layout, the left column ought to be the main navigational area. You can place other information on the right hand side. Examples of this include advertising, other kinds of creatives or any other special offers that you might want to run. This is the layout that has proven to be the very most effective.
Placing a link to your contact page is essential and it’s not just for your readers. Search engines will look for these pages and figure that into how they want to rank you, and other important reasons are those times when you may submit your site for listings. Depending on what you’re doing, other people will review your site and it will have a negative effect if there is no contact page. Don’t be afraid to use your business address and other details because so many sites do not do this.
It’s so easy these days to get a privacy policy even if it’s a basic one – and you really should do this. Other information will be what is done with it and what the visitor can expect, and it’s fine to edit that out or change it so it’s more accurate, but the important point here is to have this policy on its own page. Once in a while people will place these links in the side bar at the bottom, but that’s up to you. Some people do not want to use them on every page, but I think it’s a good thing to do.
Avoid thinking about optimizing for user friendliness in universal terms even though the concepts tend to be that way. You may need to make a change here and there, depending upon who is going to be visiting your site. And there are always exceptions to all rules, so you may be able to get away with things others cannot.