As I get deeper into my own learning curve and think about the various ways I can improve my skills, improve my own sites, and improve sites for my clients, I’ve been thinking a lot about not just getting in new visitors, but also maximizing the value of my site to every visitor who shows up on one of my webpages. It’s all part of the cardinal rule of web design, which is:

Don’t piss off your website visitors

This train of thought started here, in an email I received from Tanya of bugnbelle.com, whose site we launched recently. She sent me an email saying this, after I pointed out to her some features I had built into her website and how she could use her web aps more effectively:

I have to tell you. There are many ebay graphics gals who have switched over to doing websites and after working with you, and my orginal gal was an actual website gal too, but she didn’t do shopping carts, while they may do a good job making a nice looking site, they don’t know diddly about a LOT. I suspect the notion that you need to optimize for screen size/ system/ etc… is probably novel to a lot of them. I just read a very good article on this though! Thank you for educating me about this all.

When designing a site I try to allow as many visitors to have a good experience as I can. To that end I’m now extending my learning curve into the Accessibility arena, which is the next step. But though I’m not quite BobbyProofed yet, I do build a lot of user friendliness into each and every site I design. And WAI guidelines and how to achieve them is my current steep climb on the neverending learning curve. Meanwhile I make sure all navigation is easy to find, easy to use and makes sense within the layout. The site is clearly identified as to identity and purpose. And text is legible, and capable of being adjusted in size. All elements are visible and the contrast allows text to be read easily. And things “make sense”, there are no surprises.

One of the things I learned fairly early on is that very few computers alow users tosee a website exactly the same way from one to another. There are differences in screen size, resolution, user default settings such as font size and whether links are underlined, user default background settings, and myriad other details that will make one person’s experience with my site different from other peoples’ NO MATTER WHAT I DO. The important thing here is that everyone (or as near as I can possibly make it that way) gets a usable website. I try to anticipate as many of the oopses as I can. So if you increase font size in your browser to 150% of browser default you’ll still be able to use my website. Will it be as pixel perfect attractive as it is at normal text size? No. Is it usable, and legible, with all text visible, and with no overlapping parts, and do all the links function? Yes. It’s horrifying how many sites on the web don’t pay attention to this simple thing– try it and see. Go to any five of the sites you like and try increasing the text to largest in IE or three clicks in Firefox and see if you end up with a mess of overlap and missing stuff. You’ll be shocked how often you do.

I run every site I design through the Wickline ColorBlind WebPage Filter to make sure that folks with color/vision disabilities will be able to see my text and my links. If they can’t see links, then they can’t use them, so all links are bold text as well as a different color, so that any difference can be seen. On links that occur within paragraph text I leave underlining ON. Why? Again, to aid those with any sort of vision issue to distinguish links from regular text if for some reason they can’t differentiate the color. People who don’t like the underlines have the option of turning them off in their own browser settings, but people with vision problems don’t have an option to “fix” their eyesight to use a site without the aid. So let’s make it friendly for everyone.

Then there are things like screen size, resolution, and how they can affect things like font size, font style and text. When I test a webpage’s font resizing I also narrow the screen to around 800 pixels wide. Why? Because, according to the stats on my own website, I still get around 20% of my traffic from people using this older resolution. And text resizing larger is even touchier in narrower screens. Also, italic text is a no-no. I love it in print, it’s wonderful in that medium, where the print dpi is usually in excess of 300 dpi. But most webscreens have a native resolution of only 72-96 dpi, which leaves italic text jaggy and very hard to read, especially for those with vision problems. So “cite” gets styled without italics. Which also steers me clear of all the IE buggies that get triggered by them.

And that leads us to Browser compatibility. I test all sites in IE6, FF and Opera on Win2k, on IE7, FF and Opera on WinXP, and on FF and Safari on OSX. All browsers, though not absolutely positively pixel perfect identical, will be as close as I can make them, and all will get an attractive and usable site. If 2% of your visitors use, for example, Safari, and your site gets 1200 visitors a day, then that means 24 people a day see your site using Safari. If they can’t use your site, then that’s 24 people you are chasing away each and every single day. That’s 720 people a month. If 5% of your web visitors convert to a sale, then that’s roughly a potential 35 sales a month you’re throwing away. At least that’s my figuring, though I admit I’m not a stat whiz. Bottom line is though, that it’s affecting your bottom line.

If your site also ignores all the other points I’ve brought up, then it’s more likely that there are more sales you’re tossing out the window. Why? A well designed website that doesn’t ignore these things doesn’t cost any different than a crappy coded one usually, at least from what I’ve been finding out, and if it is a bit more, you’ll see the difference back in multiples. It’s smart business.

Getting people to your website is not enough. Giving them a reason to stick around and get to know you and your product or service is the next step, and if there are people who can’t experience your website in a positive way, that won’t happen for them. I know the strict SEO weenies say code quality doesn’t matter, but I will bet you that usable and well structured websites get more pageviews per unique visitor than those that don’t pay attention to these simple guidelines. Building a website to be usable by as many people as is possible is the first step in a positive user experience.

Technorati Tags: Website Usability, Website Accessibility, Font Resizing, Resolution, SEO, Web Design

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 24th, 2007 at 6:20 am and is filed under Web Design, SEO, Accessibility and Usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.