Creating the User-Friendly Website

A site with lots of CPM ads covering the face of the website means it is a high-traffic site, but what do those ads say about your website? You care more about 'revenue' than about aesthetics.

A site with lots of 'helpful' links and banners, scrolling marquees, blinking text (that works only in FF), and fancy logos and backgrounds: what do these tell about your site? You're a novice. Those add-ons don't necessarily equate with un-user-friendly; they're usually signs of web novices who don't have content for their website. When you have real content, you won't have room for those add-ons.

There are uncountable gazillions of websites on the net, with reports popping up all over say that there are thousands of new websites every day. Which of those are considered user-friendly?

Here are a few guidelines to give you an idea of what a user-friendly website should have:

1. Keep every site within one to two clicks from your home page. Not only does this make it easier to navigate, it lets the search engines index your site more easily.
2. Create a contact page with FAQs instead of giving out your email address or creating a mailto link.
3. Keep the page clear of leaks. A leak is something that distracts the visitor from what you want to achieve. If you want to capture the visitor's email address, you wouldn't put ads on the page, or the like. If your site is about, say, basketball, you wouldn't put an affiliate link to DreamHost just because it'll bring you money.
4. Make a sitemap for your website. Even if you have search on your website, you would want to make a sitemap for two reasons: 1. Sometimes people are simply 'surfing,' and not looking for anything specifically. A link to the sitemap from the website's home page would tell them what you have on your site. 2. The search engines find it easier to find and index your pages when you have a sitemap.
5. Keep the navigation in one place, i.e. don't put some navigation menus here, and some there. It's okay to have some 'featured' content like Yahoo does, because the featured content is not hard to find. The thing is, if you have some menus here and some there, the page looks very disorderly.
6. Align your page elements. I have seen pages with huge gaps on one side of the two column layout because there wasn't enough content. See, that's the problem when you have an inflexible template: it doesn't expand and shrink to fit your content. When you have such a template, make sure you add something to, uh, fill the gap.
7. Here's the rule to making the user-friendly website:

DON'T MAKE ME THINK! (Sorry Steve Krug.)

Yeah, that's the name of a great thin book that talks about web design. The book's central theme is don't make your visitors think. Don't make them look for what they need. Put the most important info where they would see it first.

Make it easy for your visitors to get around in your site, to use the features on your site. That's user-friendly.