"Three Easy Steps to
Making Your Web Site Easy to Use"

There are three main things to consider when making your website easy to use:  typography, image loading and linking.

No matter how brilliant your website design is, if it is hard to reach the content of your site then your site is as useful as an air conditioner in the winter.  Here are some tips to improve the usability of your website to ensure it serves its functions optimally.

The first thing to do is to make sure the typography of your content is suitable.  If you have large blocks of text, make sure to use CSS (cascading style sheets) to space out the lines accordingly.  The longer a single line of text is, the greater the line-height of each line should be.  It is best to keep a line length short so reading is easier (just think 'newspapers', they always have shorter line lengths.  This enables the reader to read quickly and easily.  Also, make sure the font size of your text is big enough to read easily.  Some sites have 10-pixel-tall text in Verdana font; while that may look neat and tidy, you have to really strain your eyes to read the actual text.

Next, ensure that your site loads fast if you do not want to lose visitors.  Most internet users will leave a website if it doesn't load completely within 10 seconds.  So, make sure the best part of your website is delivered to the visitors as soon as possible to retain their attention.  I know that I don't last much longer than 20 seconds.

Even though more and more Internet users switch to broadband every year, a large portion of the web's population is still running on good old dialup connections.  It is therefore unwise to count them out of the equation when you're designing your website, so you need to consider loading time for dialup users.

If you own Photoshop, it will be obvious to you that when you save an image as a JPEG file, a dialog box appears and lets you choose the "quality" of the JPEG image.  Normally a setting of 8 to 10 is good enough as it will preserve the quality of your image while saving it at a small file size.  If you do not have Photoshop, there are many free image compressors online that you can download and use to reduce your image's file size.

You can also save your images in GIF format -- the image editing software clips away all the color information not used in your image, hence giving you the smallest file size possible.  However, saving in GIF format will often compromise the appearance of your image, so, test the file online and make your choice wisely!

Last of all, test each and every link on your site before it goes online.  There is nothing more effective in tarnishing your professional image than broken links, so be very careful about that.

Make it easy for visitors to find content that they want on your site.  If you have thousands of articles on your site and a certain visitor wants to find one single article from that pile, you have to provide a feasible means to enable visitors to do that without hassle. Be it an SQL-driven database search engine or just a glossary or index of articles that you have, providing such a feature will make sure your visitors can use your site with ease.

Talk to you later,
Connie Casparie
"The Creative Nerd"