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When you consider it, the most impressive sites are USER-FRIENDLY. To give great site usability, you need to make sure of four things:

Unique, instructional, up-to-date contentSmart and user-friendly structurePerfect, easy to use functionalityAttractive yet usable design

Structure:

Having an organised and systematic website is the best method of ensuring that your users finish with the data they are after, or the goods they want to buy (or both!). Select what you want people to do on your website - figure out the main actions and focus on creating a navigational structure that enables people to do those actions easily.

Your site's main page is absolutely essential to this. By using clear and easy to use structure and navigation, it must communicate:

the purpose of your websiteyour website's contentshow to obtain those contents(and if it's an online store site) how to buy something

Unless it's relevant to your organisation, don't gunk up your home page with a useless Flash intro that takes forever to load. And if you really think you have to, make it skippable! Refer to the biggest sites on the web and emulate them. Learn from their best features to avoid your audience having to overthink and change their everyday internet browsing behaviour.

Ballast the amount of body text or page length with the number of levels in the website's hierarchy. Never forget, the further down a page is in the hierarchy, the denser the body text or content on that page can be, because people are already hooked into your site. On a deep website that's content heavy, putting in 'breadcrumbs' will ensure visitors always clearly realise their relative position within the website.

Users travel around a site in distinctive ways. Some hit big buttons, others choose to use the navigation. Whereas others are more inclined towards hyperlinks in the body text. Providing numerous ways of easy to use navigation makes sure that people find what they're looking for. Whatever you do, ensure it's consistent across your website. The majority of people don't read sites - they scan them. There exist millions of sites out there and life is too short to read them all. Spend some time grouping the different categories of content on your pages so that the groups relate coherently with what the audience needs. Make that strategy of categorisation useful to the way your usual site browser thinks. Try to develop a site structure that's tailored more to what the visitor is seeking out, instead of to what it is you do.

Design:

Exuberant design is a good thing, but on the whole the web is about tracking down information and transacting. An effective site's design should complement those things, not outrank them. Some of the internet's most popular sites (ie. Craigslist) have a face that only a mother could love! But people still use them because they just work.

Don't get me wrong, design a website that is appropriate to the sensibilities of your wanted audience. But while you're doing so, attempt to set your sights on developing a simple, clean design that complements your main content, highlights your website's navigation, yet does not overcome your user. And make it coherent! Websites that use a really small typeface, or bright text embossed on top of dark backgrounds or even worse, black text on a dark backdrop are just making it all too difficult.

Design isn't all about what the site looks like, either. An important fact to realise is that Google's crawlers don't read pictures; they read words. This means that to improve your site's ranking in search engines, you can't bury essential keyphrases inside nice images - they have to be HTML text.

Finally, consider that effective web design isn't just the terrain of cashed up companies. There are literally tens of thousands of templates around on the net that can be customised to suit your needs.

Content:

Yeah, you want a sexy looking website, but it's the content that's going to influence visitors and get your website its repeat users. So how is effective content best written? By placing your focus on your audience's needs, rather than the paraphernalia you're offering, and by allowing your audience to contribute.

Examples of strategies to create effective content are:

Offering analysis and/or commentary on your subject area or organisation that's factualUrging known industry experts to offer articles for your siteOffering a current news feed on your industry or subjectAllowing subscription to a feed of syndicated content that's appropriateGiving access to your site's visitors to give content through things like forums, blogs, wikis, images and videos, audio and reviews.

Go on, imagine the most distant reaches of outer space and fill it with text and images. That's roughly how much content and products there are on the net (please don't email us asking for the stats to back that up!). If a person doesn't know exactly which URL to go to, the way that users uncover that information or item is to search for it.

To attain a high ranking in search results, you're going to need high quality content. This is because the search engines have complex functions that determine a site's rank based on their reading of its text. All the pages on your website should be written so that they appeal both to your visitors and the search engines. You need to keep using your keywords and phrases so that the search engines' crawlers detect the high relevance of your site to the targeted keyphrases you've identified as important in your area. Be sure to have a look at our section on search engine marketing (SEO) to learn more about this.

To keep the users flocking to your website remember to update your site at regular intervals or whenever new topics arise. Users have got to have an incentive to come back to your website time and time again. You can get inspiration for new copy from trade publications, local news, or the Net, but DON'T plagiarise. Search engines are intelligent enough to figure that out!

Unique offers or sales make fantastic new content too and give you a good reason to contact people who have opted in to get in further correspondence from your business or organisation. Make sure you read our section on electronic direct mail to find out more about this.

Functionality:

Functionality derives from the Latin word functio meaning 'to perform'. In IT, it refers to what a given product, such as a website, software application or computing device, can actually do for a user.

In order to understand the most important needs of a site's functionality, you need only ask yourself the question "What is the overriding intent of the website?" The intent dictates the function the site must enact, and the usability of functionality is decided by how effectively it performs that function.

After determining the website's purpose, the functional features of the website must then work with two equally important considerations:

1. What are the tools that will benefit your users when browsing your website?

2. What are the functions that will profit you when maintaining your website and realising the work that your business does on your website?

For example, consider a site that sells womenswear. From the customer point of view, the ease of choosing and purchasing a good can effectively lessen the amount of cancelled sales, and the recognition of second- or third-time customers can help to increase returning purchases. Functionality like 'customers who purchased this product also bought....' can raise sales volume or frequency. Top-notch search and navigation will afford users a higher potential of finding what they're seeking out. The capability to monitor the progress of a purchase and to quickly fix up any issues or queries is also good to have.

If you were the site owner in the e-commerce women's clothes example, features that help you get the order right and get it packaged and sent quickly to the right address are key. A good and accurate interface to your record system and a CMS that allows the site to be easily and quickly updated with new goods and new information are also essential to the site's success.

In the technical arena, the best key to user-friendly functionality is simplicity. Clumsy log in procedures, counterintuitive transaction procedures, technical oversophistication and unnecessary reiteration should be avoided like the plague. Remember to make your customer's needs the focal point of the site and you shouldn't go far wrong. When proposing the creation of a new tool to your site, ask yourself if it truly adds to the site's ability to propagate its stated objectives. If the answer is not a screeching and resounding YES! Then you are likely better off without it.

Richard Crawford is a web designer who knows how to make great websites.

Find out more about what makes a great website, or how to make a great website.