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Is Website Usability Important?

This blog entry is being done in the heat of the moment so please bear with me!

I’m always looking for tools to assist me and my clients in order that they get the very best results from there website and internet marketing initiatives so when I found a free, great sounding tool to use, I jumped at it – only problem was, to use the website to download this tool was a nightmare.

The site (serprank.com), ranked #1 for my particular search.  They had done a great job with the most important aspect of internet marketing – Search Engine Marketing; which is yet another example of why proper SEO is extremely important.  The problem was that once they got me to their site, they thought that was all that was required.  WRONG.

Their site was so littered with Ads/AdChoices (which are ‘related’ ads that are inserted into a website, quite often of spammy competitors) it looked unprofessional.  The info on the specific plugin I wanted was at the bottom of the page.  That link took me to another page which talked about ‘Download’, ‘Free’, ‘Features’, etc. – none of these words were clickable even though they appeared as such.  After some time, I found some text within one of the paragraphs that had instructions to sign up.  GRRRR.  I’m not a fan of signing up for things at the best of times, but since they had a privacy policy I finally did.  It all fairness, they sign up only had 2 fields which is a real positive but then the when I submitted my info, I got sent to an error page!!!  Frustration x 10!!

I left the site completely and went searching for a competitive product.  Customer lost, never to be seen again.

When developing a website, not just designing one, it is very important to take into consideration how usable it will be from the end user’s perspective.  A website needs to easily appease the goals of the user/searcher and weigh that against the business goals of your website.  Typical website designers don’t take this into consideration – it’s all about the pretty, but pretty doesn’t make money.

That was my mini-rant on how a poor website user experience will/can lead to a business losing all the momentum they may have gained with proper search engine optimization.

Tell me about your website usability experiences – both good AND bad.

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