If you are starting a site design from scratch or simply redesigning an existing site it's easy to become overwhelmed with all the details and decisions you have to make. Many people fall victim to flashy, glamorous sites that are a nightmare with respect to usability. It's important to realize that easy will always win over fancy and that usable will triumph over glitz and glam. With that in mind, here are 5 tips that can help you improve your website, making it more user friendly and ultimately more profitable.

1. Avoid using images or graphics for the entire design of your site. Search engines can't read your beautiful images, and this will make it very hard for them to know what your site is about. It also makes it very difficult to make changes to your site, and isn't very friendly to surfers using screen readers. If you do use images, be sure to use the ALT tag with a description of the text. This will help vision impaired users and search engines navigate your content.

2. Test all the pages and features of your site before you launch and after any changes. It's a great idea to do this with multiple browsers if at all possible. You want to make sure that your site maintains a consistent appearance and is functional across multiple platforms. This will help ensure that no matter how your visitors are viewing your site they will get the experience that you intended.

3. Make your site easy to navigate. While that all flash, multi-colored, whizz-bang navigation bar may be really snazzy, ask yourself if you really need it. You want visitors to have easy to use, consistent navigation so they can find the information they need on your site. If a fancy navigation system is a must for your design, then at least consider adding an alternative. The most common way to do this is with a series of simple text links in your footer.

4. Apply at least basic SEO whenever possible. This will help the search engines know what your pages are about. It will also make your site easier to find when potential customers have a need that you can fill. At a minimum, you want each of your pages to have their own unique meta tags. This means that your pages should have different title tags, description tags, and keywords. No need to go crazy with this as spamming is usually frowned upon. Just a handful of good related words that tell what your page is about. This should really be part of any SEO services that you get, and if not you may want to consider a new vendor.

5. Check your site for errors and spelling. Your website will be judged in the blink of an eye, so make sure that you put your best foot forward. If you're going to ask people to give you money, it's important to spell-check your site. At the very least, have a coworker or close friend read over the sites content and help you spot any grammar or spelling errors. You may also use this time to check for broken or out of date links. Every error that your customer encounters is one more chance that they will leave and head for your competitors.

When implementing these usability and SEO tips, it is important to TEST, TEST, TEST. You want to make certain that your website projects the very best about you and your business. It may very well be the only impression you get, so make it count. As always, if you need help be sure an contact us for all your website development needs.