How To Make Your Website Easy To Access And Navigate - Part 1Posted June 12th, 2011The purpose of this article is to outline in plain English steps that will make it easy for visitors to access and navigate your website. It’s important to have your website made easy to navigate if you want to keep visitors, otherwise they will just visit once and may never come back. This topic of how to make a site accessible has been written about many times, and most writers use a lot of technical words that have to do with coding, php, HTML etc. I will avoid technical terms and just lay it out as simply as possible. First, it’s not at all difficult to do the little things that make it so. You just have to make sure you do them properly. Step Number One The layout of the website should be the same throughout all your pages as far as the top part is concerned. That means the logo and the main menus should remain the same. Many website designers sometimes get carried away trying to create variety. Variety is cool, but some things are more important design in such a way that the website is easy to navigate. When the logo and menus are the same, a visitor can go from any page to any other page. A badly designed site is one where you have to keep going back to the home page in order to find the other pages. So it’s important to make sure that any page can be reached from any other page. That’s what we mean by the same layout. Step Number Two Always add what is called “alternate text” to all your images. Whenever you insert an image on a web page, most of the modern web design software, even the free ones, will give you an option to input alternate text. It is basically a description of the image or its function. Why would you want to describe an image with alternate text in addition to the caption? The reason is that with slow computers, images (especially large ones) take a while to load onto the screen. The alternate text will load first, telling the viewer what image is coming or is loading. This is important especially if the image is a link to another page or another site. If the image takes too long to load, then the viewer can just click on the image space to go to the link’s destination, instead of waiting for the image to finish loading. When you type the alternate text for an image that has a link, it’s always a good idea to type something like, “visit my website” or wherever the link leads. The above steps are just the beginning of how you can make your website pleasant for visitors to view and navigate, thus increasing the chances that they will come back, or even recommend it to others. In the next part, I will outline more simple steps to make your site pleasant to visit.
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