A hot topic for website designers in Columbus Ohio and elsewhere is website usability.  There are commonly accepted standards for website usability, based on studies of human behavior and psychology.  These standards set the parameter of basic website design.  Usability standards generally address four issues:  Accessibility, Navigation, Content, and Branding.  We’ll discuss all four parts in the weeks to come, but today we are going to take a look at how we think about branding with your website.

All usability standards are designed with one premise in mind:  meet the needs of the user.  The company and the web designer who really spend time trying to understand the website visitor, their reasons for visiting, and what they are expecting to get out of the visit will design a better website.  The guidelines just help focus the efforts.

When it comes to the issue of branding, the first thing most potential customers want to know when they come to your site is “Who are you?”  That question is then very quickly followed by “How do you help me?” and “Why should I trust you?”

To answer the “who are you” question, the website usability standards say you should prominently display your logo in the upper left-hand corner of the page.  Americans are taught to read from left to right, top to bottom, so the most important image and words should be in the upper left.  If you are designing for an Asian market, your image and text positioning would be different.

Studies have shown that the eye gravitates to images before words, and photos draw attention the quickest.  Website design usability standards suggest the use of photos whenever possible.  Graphic elements should be spread out over the page, at the top, middle, and bottom, to draw the visitor’s eye into the text.

Your headline and tagline need to grab attention.  Put it in English.  Don’t be overly cute or clever.  You have at most 5 to 8 seconds to capture their attention.  If you can answer the question “How do you help me?” in a clear, captivating tagline, you will be miles ahead of your competition.

The path to the information the visitors seeks should be clear and obvious.  Don’t make the visitor guess where they are supposed to go next.  We’ll discuss this more in our post about navigation, but despite what you may have read that the longer you can keep a customer on your site, the better, if they are on your site getting frustrated because they can’t find what they need, they will leave and never come back.  That’s not the goal.

As for building trust, your site needs to meet the visitor’s expectations.  Misspellings, broken links or slow downloads, all of these issues feed into the website visitor’s first impressions.  It may seem cliché, but most visitors expect to see a tab that says About Us and Contact Us.  These convey a sense that you are legitimate and trustworthy.

After an initial design is done, you need to step back, put yourself in the customer’s shoes, and approach the website’s home page as the potential customer might.  Did you show the customer who you are?  Did you tell them how you could help them?  And are you demonstrating that they can trust you?

We try hard to design usable, visitor-friendly websites. Our Columbus Ohio website design team is here, ready to help build your brand.  We don’t just build your website, we build your business.