Key Tips for Better Website Usability Ron Jones | October 3, 2011 | 1 Comment inShare30 How you can fortify your website and fix usability issues. So you have a great website that is loaded with great content but is it not converting and most of your visitors leave your site within the first 60 seconds. If this is the situation you are in, you might have a site that isn't friendly enough to your users. In other words, it isn't easy to navigate and find information within your site. Website usability is a common concept among web designers. It is generally known that people visit your website with a specific task in mind. Use Keyword Phrases That Your Audience Is Searching On One of the first things site visitors look for are some visual clues that help them feel they have landed on a site that will help them solve their problem. Armed with your researched and targeted keywords, you should make sure they are prominently placed on the landing page. Consistent and Intuitive Site Navigation Menus. Optimized Content Strategy
How to Perform the World's Greatest SEO Audit The author's views are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz. Now that tax season is over, it's once again safe to say my favorite A-word... audit! That's right. My name is Steve, and I'm an SEO audit junkie. Like any good junkie, I've read every audit-related article; I've written thousands of lines of audit-related code, and I've performed audits for friends, clients, and pretty much everyone else I know with a website. All of this research and experience has helped me create an insanely thorough SEO audit process. This is designed to be a comprehensive guide for performing a technical SEO audit. SEO Audit Preparation When performing an audit, most people want to dive right into the analysis. A thorough audit requires at least a little planning to ensure nothing slips through the cracks. Crawl Before You Walk Before we can diagnose problems with the site, we have to know exactly what we're dealing with. Crawling Tools
113 Design Guidelines for Homepage Usability (Nielsen Norman Group) Topics Author Recent Articles Popular Articles Subscribe to: While many of these guidelines can apply to web design in general, they are especially critical to follow when designing your homepage, because the stakes are so high. Even small changes to homepages can have drastic effects. While we encourage you to use these guidelines as a checklist when designing your homepage, recognize that they are written in an abbreviated manner here. All said, these are just guidelines, not axioms. What's Not in These Guidelines In an effort to limit the focus specifically to homepage guidelines, there are several important issues we do not address. Determining Homepage Content One of the most important design decisions for any homepage is determining what content merits homepage coverage. There are several usability methods that can identify and prioritize users' needs based on real data and observation. General Web Design Vertical Industry Segments We cannot provide a set of generic vertical guidelines.
10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines - Smashing UX Design Advertisement Everyone would agree that usability is an important aspect of Web design. Whether you’re working on a portfolio website, online store or Web app, making your pages easy and enjoyable for your visitors to use is key. Many studies have been done over the years on various aspects of Web and interface design, and the findings are valuable in helping us improve our work. 1. A study by UX Matters found that the ideal position for labels in forms is above the fields. Tumblr features a simple and elegant sign-up form that adheres to UX Matter’s recommendation. Positioning labels on the left also poses another problem: do you left-align or right-align the labels? 2. People instinctively notice other people right away when they come into view. Eye-tracking heat map of a baby looking directly at us, from the UsableWorld study. And now the baby is looking at the content. Here’s an eye-tracking study that demonstrates this. 3. 4. Basecamp makes great use of space. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Twitter Search, Monitoring, & Analytics | Topsy.com With iOS 9, Search lets you look for content from the web, your contacts, apps, nearby places, and more. Powered by Siri, Search offers suggestions and updates results as you type. There are two ways to use Search on your iOS device. Quick Search Drag down from the middle of the Home screen and type what you're looking for. Siri Suggestions Drag right from the Home screen to show Search and get Siri Suggestions. Get Siri Suggestions Siri Suggestions include apps and contacts that you might be interested in. You can use Siri Suggestions with iPhone 5 and later, iPad Pro, iPad (4th generation) and later, iPad mini (2nd generation) and later, and iPod touch (6th generation). Change search settings Go to Settings > General > Spotlight Search. From here, you can turn Siri Suggestions on or off and choose which apps to include in your searches. If you don’t want Siri or Spotlight to suggest nearby locations, go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services. Last Modified:
Character Sets / Character Encoding Issues Introduction Let’s first define some terms to make it easier to understand the following sections (taken from the book XML Internationalization and Localization). See also the introductory WIKI page on i18n. A character is the smallest component of written language that has a semantic value. Examples of characters are letters, ideographs (e.g. Chinese characters), punctuation marks, digits etc. A character set is a group of characters without associated numerical values. Coded character sets are character sets in which each character is associated with a scalar value: a code point. In many cases, the encoding is just a direct projection of the scalar values, and there is no real distinction between the coded character set and its serialized representation. Unicode and its encodings For Unicode (also called Universal Character Set or UCS), a coded character set developed by the Unicode consortium, there a several possible encodings: UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32. PHP and character sets if ( !
22 Essential Tools for Testing Your Website's Usability The Web Design Usability Series is supported by join.me, an easy way to instantly share your screen with anyone. join.me lets you collaborate on-the-fly, put your heads together super-fast and even just show off. A site's ease of use, or its usability, is an integral part of its success, especially with websites becoming more and more interactive, complex and packed with features. User-centered design is all about building websites that fulfill the goals and desires of its users, and at the heart of this concept is that a user must be able interact with your website effectively. Testing usability is an art and a science. In this post, we'll discuss six crucial factors that affect usability. We'll focus on practical usability testing, so the emphasis is on pragmatic and inexpensive strategies that most site owners can do. What other tools have you used to test website usability? 1. The first thing that must be done is determine what the core user tasks are. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
About rel="canonical" - Webmaster Tools Help This article describes how you can use canonical URLs to improve link and ranking signals for content available through multiple URL structures or via syndication. In the world of content management and online shopping systems, it's common for the same content to be accessed through multiple URLs. With content syndication, it's also easy for content to be distributed to different URLs and domains entirely. While these systems make it more convenient to develop and distribute content, they cause some challenges when people use search engines to reach your page. Consolidating link signals for the duplicate or similar content. To address these issues, we recommend you define a canonical URL for content (or equivalent content) available through multiple URLs. While we encourage you to use any of these methods, none of them are required. Don't use the robots.txt file for canonicalization purposes. Set your preferred domain