How Best to Test Your Website for Usability

As most digital marketers very well know, your website is your front office online. It is the best place to showcase and promote your goods/services to attract customers. To be able to perform that function effectively and efficiently, your website must be easily usable. So, it helps your business a great deal if you can routinely and regularly carry out usability testing on your website to be sure it does for your business what you expect it to do. Most importantly, it is extremely vital to go through various types of usability testing for your website even before you launch it. If its various functional aspects like speed and flow are unable to enhance user experience, your business suffers the consequence.


 
Here is what to test

Customer Experience

Every business is online to get customers. You can hardly get a good customer experience without easy usability of your website. If you have an in depth understanding of the needs of your customers, you can position your website to meet these needs. A good customer experience usually translates to good customers and good business.

Easy Accessibility

Web users are notoriously impatient. Getting hits on your website is directly related to how easily accessible it is. When users encounter a bit of difficulty in accessing your website, they quickly move on and your business suffers the consequence. Easy web accessibility allows people with a wide range of abilities to navigate and interact with your website without stress and that is good for your business.

Brand Positioning

Your brand is your business. If your website cannot position and promote your brand effectively, it does not help your business. Poor quality of usability of your website cannot help you to gain the trust of your customers easily. That is the trust which helps the growth and popularity of your brand and your business. Doing a few right and proper things on your website helps to ensure a highly optimized user experience which can promote the overall perception of your brand.

Customer Conversions

It is just not enough to get a lot of hits and visits to your website. What matters most is how many of such visitors end up becoming customers. The higher the conversion rate, the better for your business! Customer experience plays a great role in increased customer conversion rates the reason it is a credible test for your website usability.

Productive Systems

Very easy to deploy and use systems greatly enhance customers experience. What your website needs are systems which are very easy to use and can be updated using simple but effective methods. Such systems if in place are extremely valuable assets for your business because they greatly enhance the productivity of your website. 

Basic Website Design Tips for Small Businesses

If you own a small business, and you want to get into digital marketing, the place to be is on the Internet. You must have an effective online presence in terms of a well-built and hosted website if you want your business to go far. Getting and hosting a website is not rocket science. You can get things done yourself if you have prior experience with websites. What matters most is to have an idea what you want a website for and with the help of so many tools available on the internet, you can package a useful website for your small business. With a small rental fee payable annually in most cases, you can have it hosted for you with all the functionalities in tow. You may not have to do too much to get your website in place, up and running for your digital business. But, be very thoughtful and clear about what you want to achieve then go about it systematically. If you get it right, your business will be better for it.


 
Here are some useful small business website building tips which can help you out.

Choose a Domain Name 

Your domain name will serve as your web address and it must be unique to you and your business. A good domain name must be short, crisp, and easy to spell and remember. It must be devoid of numbers and hyphens. That is the only way it can help promote your business online by being easily SEO-friendly.

Choose a Reputable Website Host

You need a good website hosting firm to launch and support your website on the internet.  To make that choice, what you must consider are hosting fees, support systems and reputation. Consulting other small business owners and searching up on the internet will help you out in making these decisions. What the hosting firm does is to connect your domain name and assign server space to keep the contents of your website on the internet. That is the real technical support your website really needs for it to be searchable and viewed on the internet.

Concise Website Description

You must make it easy for searchers to know who they are dealing with when they hit your website. To achieve that, you must have your “About Us” link on your home page clearly visible and easy to see by your website visitors. This is where your carefully designed logo/image and all other visual representations of your products and services should be displayed. All these with a view to carefully convey to your audience in a very attractive manner, your brand story, history, values, products and even your bragging rights. 

Good Content Management

It is not enough to just have good content on your website, it must be properly managed to attract and keep users on your site long enough to do business with you. For this, you need good content management platforms like WordPress, Joomla, Wix and suchlike platforms you may decide upon. What you get from some of these platforms are many useful plugins, beautiful themes plus active support community. To boot, their installation is easy, largely free and they are very simple to use.

Suitable e-Commerce Platform

A small business website plays the role of a store front office. The reason it must have the requisite e-commerce platform for display and sale of your products. What is important is that the e-commerce platform you choose must be in sync with your type of business. Without that, it will not be very effective. Various e-commerce platforms like Shopify are available out there on the internet for you to choose from and all are easy to deploy and use on your website.