Posted on April 22, 2009 by admin

When undertaking site and page evaluations from a human visitor perspective the emphasis should be on seven factors that influence people the most when visiting a web site.

Visual Appearance
Complementary colors should be chosen for the site so as to match the theme of the site with text of a color and size that makes it easy to read for people of all ages. Backgrounds or images should not be distracting and should compliment the look and theme of the web page providing additional useful information and enhancing the visitor’s perception and understanding of the site. Do not use images unless they contribute to your message.

Visitor Impact
The web page should clearly convey the impression you want the visitor to have all within 3 to 5 seconds of them landing on the page. Your web page must give people a quick and clear summary of what you are offering. If people can’t quickly grasp the essence of what you are offering they will not stick around.

Clarity and Value of Proposition
The information, product or service you are offering needs to be crystal clear to the visitor. Uncertainty regarding what’s being offered leads to confusion and visitor loss. The offer also needs to clearly convey value to the visitor. The page needs to answer the questions why should they accept what you say or buy from you rather than someone else and what’s in it for them.

Slide and Glide
Avoid the use multi-column page layouts. Eye tracking studies conducted on multi-column page layouts have shown they significantly distract the visitor from reaching the main objective of the page. Many studies have also shown that in general, key information or impressions you want to impart to the visitor should be across the top of the page below the header, in the top left corner and page center. Using these guidelines a layout can be designed with minimal distractions and an easy to follow flowing path to the objective of the page.

Page Navigation
Navigation of the page should be easy to use, links in the page should look like links – blue underlined and it should be clear what they are leading to. Use alt tags for images and title tags for text links as a further visual aid for visitors. Using link and image tags will make your site more accessible to the visually impaired and add to your compliance to W3C web design standards.

Web Site Navigation
This often creates a conflict for web site optimization as the site navigation preferred for people is frequently not the best for the search engines, since the two requirements are usually not the same. For common links to pages throughout the site we usually advise a top or side of page navigation menu that should have a consistent location and appearance throughout the site. The home page is usually the only exception. Large sites can benefit from a search box and all except sites with less than 10 pages, should have a site map as a further aid to visitor navigation.

The Proposition Experience
If a site provides downloadable information, purchasable products or services, or sign-ups to obtain information, products or services, then the system the visitor must follow should be short and without distractions and hindrances. The anxiety and friction caused by a site’s order and fulfilment process is a significant factor in lost sales and site abandonment.

Page Access Time
With the advent of high-speed Internet, many web site designers have abandoned mainly text web page designs preferring instead graphical designs with flash movies and videos. Some of today’s web pages are so heavily laden with images that even for someone with a high-speed Internet connection they can be slow to access with a normal browser.

The consequence of this is that for 30-40% of Internet users without high-speed broadband such web sites are completely inaccessible or take longer to download than most people are prepared to wait.

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