Usability & Accessibility
What it is and how it works
Usability and accessibility, also known as Visitor Optimisation, essentially means making your e-business more visitor friendly, ensuring, for example, that it is accessible to disabled visitors, that it has the content people are looking for, an intuitive site design and navigation system and a clear fulfilment process.
A typical visitor usability optimisation project will therefore include:
- Optimised site design.
An optimised web site is both search engine and visitor friendly from the ground up and there are several ways we can do it. We can either work with your existing design or brand look and feel, as we have done for Ford, Disney and Virgin or design the site ourselves, as we have done for MTV, Alitalia and eJobs.
Either way, when we do the design and build ourselves not only is the process much faster, but there are fewer integration issues and the site doesn’t need to be re-optimised, as it so often is when a designer has created the site without reference or knowledge of optimisation. An optimised site consists of a series of layers, in which the design is independent of the functionality and back-end. This means that a new design, new site features or new content can be added quickly and easily.
- Optimised accessibility.
Because part of the optimisation process is to make the site accessible to search engine robots, its content can therefore be made available to web users via assistive technologies, such as screen readers or braille displays, making it compliant with accessibility standards mandatory since October 2003.
- Optimised download times.
We can make your site as fast to load as possible, so your visitors are never kept waiting, whatever their connection speed.
- Optimised site layout.
According to a recent usability survey, web visitors expect site features, such as Help, search and products and services to be in very specific areas of the site. We can not only tell you where these are, but give you a more intuitive, visitor friendly site layout as a result.
- Optimised fulfilment process.
The more visitor-friendly the fulfilment, such as the contact, application and transaction systems, the more revenue your site will generate. We can help you implement a choice of fulfilment systems that will not only encourage your visitors to take the next step, but get them there with ease.
- Optimised navigation and content.
Our Web Intelligence research will tell us what kind of content visitors are looking for, both in terms of on-site features and messaging. This will help us define not only the navigation, in terms of menu options but also the content. Our copywriter is can either optimise existing content or create new copy, whilst we can create useful site features such as A to Z indexes and site maps automatically. What’s more, the more content your site has, the more search engine friendly it is too.
- Optimised visitor data.
As registration and log-in systems aren’t search engine friendly, our in-house systems integration expert can help you with alternative ways to capture, store and manipulate visitor data, for your database or CRM system. We can also implement cookies in order to track unique users to provide further insights into your visitors’ on-site behaviour.
What it can do for you
Visitor optimisation addresses a fundamental truth about Internet Marketing - that the visitor experience of your site is just as critical to your e-business success as generating traffic. After all, there’s no point being at the top of the search engines with an award-winning site if visitors can’t find what they need, are frustrated by the functionality and leave without buying anything or even bookmarking the site.
In fact, according to a survey by NetRaker, increasing online customer satisfaction by just 5% can increase sales by 25%.
What you can do next
For more information about Weboptimiser's Usability and Accessibility services, either email or call on +44 (0) 20 7953 7199.
Alternatively, if you have any questions about usability or search engine marketing, please check our FAQ.
