Have you ever wondered how you could make your web site more effective? Most of the new startup web sites today are done with little thought given to actual usability.

Studies show that graphics are at best 20% of the over all reason why someone will use a website or any other form of advertisement for that matter. People want clear concise information delivered to them in a neat organized manner.

Internet surfers have a wealth of information at there finger tips and can easily leave one web site to go to another, so how do you keep visitors once you have them in your site?

Usability is the single most important element of any website. Let’s face it, we’re all very busy and we don’t want to spend a lot of time looking for what we need, much less how to figure out how to use a web site once we find one of interest.

I’d like to list the most important usability factors and elements and give a brief description of the best practices. Here it goes, we’ll start with navigation.

Navigation is by far the most important. Without a good navigational structure your visitor retention suffers dramatically. A good navigation needs to be planned, organized and developed so that every page can be retrieved in one or 2 clicks, 3 clicks at the very max, from within anywhere in the entire site.

Content organization seems simple enough, huh? Guess again, most of the web site owners that come to us looking for a revamp have serious problems in the area of content organization.

The best advice I can give on this is to stick to page topic. A lot of times web sites will have similar content on many different pages when they should really have the content consolidated to make it easier to final all the relevant information in one easy to find location.

Technology is another factor that plays into usability. Web designer, by nature are technology freaks. They get really excited when a new cutting edge technology comes out and they immediately want to apply it.

I certainly welcome this type of enthusiasm because without it technologies would not advance as quick, so the key here is to be conservative. When most new web technologies come out the majority of computers aren’t ready for it, meaning the browser requires an upgrade or plug-in to even view the new animation or what ever it is made possible by the new technology.