3.03 Usability

If your site is easy for your visitors to use they will find the information they are looking for, feel confident moving around your site and stay to look around.
If your site is difficult to use your visitors will fail to find what they are looking for, feel uncomfortable and probably leave your site quite quickly.

Fitting the small screen
A monitor screen isn't a piece of paper. Over hundreds of years paper pages have evolved to a universal tall and narrow format. Along comes the computer and all that is thrown out in favour of short and wide. For easier reading your pages should be laid out to shape text in to taller and narrower areas. Fitting your navigation links into a tall narrow column down one side of the page helps.
Your web designer will probably demonstrate your new site on a large, high resolution, state of the art monitor. With the growth in the popularity of laptops, pda's and internet connected mobile phones, as well as people using legacy equipment, your visitors may well be viewing your site through a much small and lower resolution window. Check that your site still works.

Scrolling
People don't like scrolling down through text – so avoid making them. Break text into separate pages once it needs more than two “page down” clicks to reach the bottom.
Help them keep their place by breaking text into short paragraphs with whitespace between them and by giving each paragraph a heading.

Below the fold
The lower part of a web page, the bit that isn't displayed when the page first loads, is said to be “below the fold” - a newspaper term for stories on the lower part of the front page and so not visible on the newsvendors display. People make decisions about whether to scroll down or to go elsewhere on on the basis of what they see “above the fold”. The visible copy should make clear what joys are hiding lower down the page.

Standard links
Your visitors will have come to your site to find out about your practice, not to spend time working out how to get from page to page. All the links on your site, including those in the text, should have the same appearance. You don't have to follow the accepted standard of underlined and blue so long as your choice stands out from the rest of your text You could just underline all links – so long as no other text in underlined.

Consistent navigation
Keep the main navigation links in the same place, in the same order and in the same style. You want to make people comfortable as they use your site and an important part of this is for them to know where they are and where they are going. If you keep swiveling the signposts they lose confidence.

Page bottom navigation
If visitors have to scroll your main navigation links off the top of the screen to read your content you should either repeat the links at the bottom of the page or provide a link to take them back to the top.

Text navigation
If your main navigation links aren't text based – if they are based on images or scripted effects – then you should provide a text only alternative for visitors who have those effects turned off. Some of the latest ways to access the internet – pda's or mobile phones for instance – have limited abilities to display some of these web page technologies.

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