Top navigation, left & right. Breadcrumbs, headers, footers. We usually think of them all as having only one function: Getting your visitors from A to B.

But - on top of that - really good navigation can help a website achieve some big essential tasks.

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Usability testing is probably the simplest, most underused way to improve your website. It’s one-off work you can do that offers a huge amount of insight & pays you back every time someone new comes to the site. However, there are a couple of simple pitfalls worth avoiding…

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“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful”

This was written by William Morris 125 years ago & famously quoted by Terence Conran as the principle guiding his Habitat stores. Words & design are the two primary elements of a website and, being one of the most celebrated designer/writers ever to have lived, William Morris’s words translate nicely to the web:

Is Everything On Your Site Useful?

• Make sure there is a reason behind every element of your primary pages - don’t just include things because you can, include them because they’re useful to you or to your visitors
• Does everything on your site help you to reach your goals?
• Do you know what each of your visitor segments is trying to do on your site? Can they achieve that?

Is Everything On Your Site Beautiful?

• Does your text & your design resonate with your audience?
• A visit to your site should be at least simple, and you should really be aiming for it to be an enjoyable experience (In a recent Forrester poll related to Holiday websites, 20% of participants said that bad site usability had caused them not to purchase online)
• The bottom line here is: If your site triggers positive emotions in your audience, they will spend more time there, keep returning, and recommend you to others

The word ‘usability’ sounds quite scientific & technical. You might see it alongside words like ‘laboratory’, ‘test procedures’ and ‘validation requirements’. But it’s not really complex at all. Usability is a very simple concept: Things should be easy to use.

With that in mind, here are 5 questions you can ask yourself to make sure new visitors perceive your website as easy to use.

1. What is this site about?
2. Why would I want to stay here?
3. Whereabouts am I in the site?
4. Where else can I go from here?
5. How can I find what I’m looking for?

A new visitor to your site should be able to answer those questions no matter what page they land on.

It’s easy to get stuck into your routine & tough to figure out which tasks are going to make the difference with your website. There are certain ‘golden’ tasks you can perform on your website that will provide a much higher return on your time. Finding that golden 20% means spending your time in a way that’s going to benefit you the most. Here’s a quick, easy task you can complete fairly quickly that will provide value for years to come.

Turning an Error into a Tool

If you go to http://www.yoursite.com/asdfgh what happens? Error pages (often called ‘404s’ because they return a ‘404 error’ code to the browser) mean that something has gone wrong on your site. Often when a visitor hits an error code they will simply move on to another site. Here are some simple things you can include on your 404 page to avoid that:

1. Apologise to the visitor briefly because you can’t provide the page they’re looking for
2. Offer the content that is most likely to appeal to them (eg. links to your most popular content, links to content in the same directory as the missing page)
3. Include a ’search’ box, allowing them to (hopefully) easily find what they were looking for
4. Briefly explain what you/your company is about, to reassure visitors they’re in the right place if they’ve landed straight onto that error page

If you’ve already done all of the above, one more useful tip is to make sure your error page doesn’t look like an error page. That sounds counterintuitive, but it works: Many visitors will immediately see the ‘Error’ style page & navigate away, or hit the back button. If you give them a chance to see that you’re providing useful content before their automatic response kicks in, you have a chance at shuffling them toward your useful content rather than losing them.