Schrijven voor het web

How usable is your site at presenting important and sought-after information about your company? Can visitors move through quickly to read or retrieve the information they are looking for?
Sites suffering from unusability, will call attention to themselves. Visitors will get lost as they browse the site.

The Obvious

It's not a bad idea to have all your contact information displayed on the home page. In fact, consider displaying it on each page, at the bottom in a smaller font size, with copyright info. Other critical information should be easy to find within one click of the home page.

Navigation

Your navigation scheme should be like a gentle guide that can direct your visitors throughout your site unobtrusively, giving just the right amount of help when necessary.

Broken Links

Broken links are like broken windows on a building -- they make your site look like it's not maintained. The first question the visitor will ask is: "Does the owner ever visit this site?"

Why Web Sites Are Unusable: Theories On Why Sites Are Poorly Built

If the text is too small, the visitor can change the size of the type, drastically altering the original design. Also changeable at the visitor's end are font faces, sizes, and colors; background colors; and browser window width. Any or all of these can destroy the designer's design. This inherent flexibility and user-centeredness of the Web is really an advantage. It allows a Web site to be equally accessible to a blind person as to a sighted person. At least this will work if the designer and developer know what they are doing.

Conclusion

If your site suffers from some of the problems mentioned in this article, you may be losing sales and visits. Your site is not alone: many, maybe even the majority, of the sites on the WWW also suffer from more than one.
The solution is to take the time to evaluate your site, assess its usability, and then to implement the changes necessary to make www.yourcompany.com usable and well-designed.