Tips to Improve Website User Experience
What's user experience? It's the concept of website design. The purpose is to offer visitor with the info what they expected and guide them to read further on your website. For ecommerce website, it means increasing of potential orders. Also, from the google latest website optimization guidelines, user experience will be considered the most important factor.
How to improve website user experience?
A good website always comes with nice user experience. For example the news report websites and ebay, we always spend lots of time once we opened up them. How they managed to do so? It's easy to exam the successful sites and get the basic ideas on how to do with our own site. Generally, the website user experience is composed by the following
- Branding
- Usability
- Functionality
- Content
What does that mean? Means regardless what kind of information we can provide on website, we must make sure the site is functional properly and usable first! For example if our website always gives out server errors or timed out for any reason, it'll never be considered as successful site. So make sure to get a quality web hosting service for your website and consult to a professional web designer to optimize the website structure properly.
Also, keep in mind user experience on website is continuing work. We need to adjust based on stats analysis and find out what to improve. The google webmaster tool is great for such purpose, so make sure to sign up with and add your website for examination.
Another important rule is user interaction. We might have tried out best to make the website user friendly but don't know how visitors think about. setup a poll and get suggestions from website visitor is always good idea. Today I went to ipage and fatcow website for the Feb promotions, when I tried to switch to another site they prompt up a survey window and ask me why to leave and how they can assist me better. Screenshot as below
How do you think about? Personally I think their team is pretty smart to keep visitors for potential purchase. It's quite important for ecommerce website. When you're not sure where to start, asking for suggestions from your website visitor will help with the improvement directly. Because the end user's opinion is what we actually needed.
User experience vs SEO
I mentioned Google optimization from the first paragraph. So what's the relationship between SEO and website user experience? Are they conflict each other? Absolutely not. The website user experience is actually considered the most important factor from latest google policy. Means a website with good user experience will rank higher comparing to those pure traditional seo based websites. It's clear to see user experience will perform more in SEO industry and will change the working mode for SEO workers. The traditional factors like link building, article submiting etc are not so important anymore. It's good news for those webmasters who are trying to offer us useful information.
