This is the first entry in a series that I want to dedicate to the User Experience.
The user experience is the most important part of any website. All the SEO in the world won't help your site if it is not designed to give your visitors a good experience. Simply put, if you give your users something they're not expecting, they probably won't know what to do and they will likely leave before buying your product or service. Remember The 3 Second Rule?
The first item I want to talk about, and one of the most common, is use link design that's "creative". Usually this involves:
- Using images for links
- Disabling mousesover changes
- Making links look the same as text
Using images for links. Using images for links is not necessarily a bad idea, you just have to do it well. Usually when I see the use of an image, it's because the designer wanted a special font that most people don't have on their computer. So, the only way to make that font visible to the rest of the world is to put it into an image. Here are a few tips for effecitvely using image links:
- Make the link look like a link, or a button, or a tab, or put it in a place where people expect to see links. The point is, all the links on your site should tell your visitors, "You can click on me!"
- Make it change a little when you mouse over it. I don't care if it changes color, underlines, changes background color, or does the hokey-pokey. Just make it respond to your visitors. Have you ever had a waitress or a bartender that ignored you? 'Nuff said.
- Use the ALT attribute, otherwise your link is WORTHLESS when it comes to SEO. A LOT of SEO power is contained in the link text. This is an example of link text, and it has a LOT of power, especially if it contains keywords that you and your webmaster worked so hard to research. Search engines can't see what an image is, they just know that it's some sort of an image. So using the ALT attribute tells search engines what's in the image. The ALT attribute is almost as good as using plain text.
Disabling mouse over changes. I see this almost as much as I see images, and I honestly don't get it. As far as I'm concerned, mouseovers are fun! Mouseovers are a way of interacting with a website that makes it feel alive and welcoming. How do you feel when you go to a site, and moving your mouse around illicits NO response from the website? Here's an example: http://www.famouscupcakes.com/
It's a cute site design, but it's DEAD. No part of the site responds to ANYTHING the visitor does. Going to a site like this feels like a bad blind date. How can your site be inviting to visitors if it doesn't respond to them? Remember that waitress or bartender that ignored you?
On the opposite site, is gmail. Almost every part of gmail is alive, responsive, and welcoming.
Making links look like text. This one happens quite a bit, and I REALLY don't understand why. How do visitors get around on your site? Links. How do you expect your visitors to get around on your site if they don't know a link when they see one?
You have probably noticed that my preference is to do the same thing as Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Youtube do (the 4 biggest websites on the internet), I leave them alone. By leaving them alone, they look like links. Every link is clearly and obviously a link.
The point of this post is to help build sites so that it meets with what people expect. Build to what your visitors expect to see and experience and you'll have a much better result from your efforts. When users have an experience that is unexpected, it's usually a bad thing, because usually they have to figure out what's going on. They probably won't admire your creativity, they'll probably be annoyed by it.
