Accommodating Your Visitors

Whether you're marketing plastic surgery or any other business online, it's important that you accommodate the visitors to your site. If you don't, you won't have those visitors for long. In order to accommodate your visitors, you must ensure that your site is usable and user-friendly.

Web usability is all about ensuring that the visitors to your website can easily and quickly find what it is that they're looking. Usability is one of the most important aspects of any website. In fact, usability expert Jakob Nielson estimates that a web usability redesign can increase a site's conversion rate by 100%.

One of the most important aspects of a usable website is that it be easy to navigate. An easy way to increase the ease of navigation is to give your visitors what they expect. Internet users have come to expect websites to look and function a certain way. When websites diverge from certain conventions, users tend to get confused. While you no doubt want your website to be an original one, sticking to some conventions can be very beneficial and increase your site's usability. When it comes to layout and certain phrases, Internet users typically expect the following:

• The company's logo is located in the top, left corner and clicking on it will bring the visitor to the homepage.
• An ‘About Us' page provides information about the company.
• Navigation is generally located on the left side of a page or on the top of a page and it is consistent throughout every page of a site.
• Anything located above the logo or flashing is considered an advertisement.

Another very important aspect of usability involves the amount of time it takes for your pages to load. It's estimated that a page must load within about eight seconds or else many visitors will simply leave. There are several tips for ensuring that your pages download quickly, including the following: using CSS in place of tables for page layout; using CSS in place of images for navigation elements; and optimizing images and graphics. It's equally important that your visitors be able to easily find the information they're looking for. You can achieve this by making your pages scannable using headings, link text, bold text and bulleted lists. Also provide visitors with a site map and even a search feature.