Usability is a very important factor in web design. For your plastic surgery website to be a successful one, it must be usable. There are two very important things to keep in mind when considering your site’s usability. First, studies have proven that people do not read on the Internet as they do offline with a magazine, newspaper or book for instance. Second, people surfing the Internet do so at a fast pace. They want the exact information they’re looking for right away and if they don’t get it they’ll simply go elsewhere. With these things in mind, there are two simple steps that you can take to increase your site’s usability and give your visitors what they want.
Keep your text concise. Keep your text, particularly important text, short and to the point. If possible, limit your paragraphs to about three to four lines and to one single idea. This will help your visitors to absorb your information more quickly. Often times, you can go through your text and find that the same thing can be conveyed in a quicker, shorter, more to-the-point way. Start by examining your homepage. Remove long paragraphs containing multiple thoughts and try to edit them down to be shorter and more precise.
- Make your text scannable. As mentioned above, people do not read on the Internet like they do offline. Instead, users tend to scan text on the Internet. As such, you can construct your text for optimum scannability. Important information or hyperlinks can be bolded, and bulleted lists are great for highlighting key points. You can even use a different, brighter color to highlight important text. Another great tip is to put your important points in your heading tags so that readers can automatically go to the information they want.