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Websites have been around for centuries now, but of course it wasn’t available to us normies until after the government decided that the military software should be given out to the public :-). Now that a huge population of people on Earth are surfing the net, things are starting to change. What I mean by that is everything is online now including clothes shopping, phone directories, and even to-go food delivery requests for your favorite restaurants. The possibilities are just endless when it comes to the Internet. The “Dot Com” crash didn’t even put a dent in the Internet, but instead made it bigger than ever. Now that the Internet is consistently growing with new users and new opportunities, it would be better to be unique and different, but that doesn’t really cut it as much anymore.

People are getting lazy now because of all the sites that require a lot of work to be done to get from Point A to Point B. Haven’t you ever been to one of those sites that require you to click here, click here, click here, oh and click here before you could arrive at the page you wanted to be at in the first place? It just frustrates your visitors if you design a site that is very difficult to navigate through. This is what we call “USER FRIENDLY” and that is what your site should have regardless of whether it’s a blog, a shop, or a company site. Your visitors need to be able to access what you are trying to advertise.

What To Do?

Now how are you going to make your own website more friendly to your readers and visitors? Actually, what would you do to gain new visitors’ attention and daily visit? Of course if you have a company site or a static site where there aren’t much updates, you won’t gain as much from it. You’re more likely to gain sales or advertisers rather than continuous readers and visitors :-).

It’s really your choice if you want to re-do your website to make it more user friendly. Sometimes your website may have already completed this, but you may not know. This is where you should ask for opinions from your readers by offering a poll voting option on the sidebar or the footer of your blog. After asking for opinions on if your website needs an actual makeover, you will decide what you want to do. If it is a fact that you need to make your website more friendly, you’re going to have to see it for yourself. If you don’t see that your own website that you love and cherish needs to be change, you won’t reach your highest potential on your final revision. Usually you would do this by sitting down with no distractions and just opening your website in a browser and scrolling through old articles, new articles, and navigation pages. Most of the time you would realize what you need to fix and you may move on from there.

After you got the hardest part down of knowing if you need to re-do your website or not, you should still think about these following steps that I personally think would give your visitors, readers, including customers a more better feel of things.

• Color Scheme - The colors you choose for your website is actually a huge factor to being user friendly too. If you have bright colors, it would most definitely hurt a visitor’s eyes regardless of what your website’s topic is. Choose something soothing and keep it to only 2-3 colors rather than 10-20 different conflicting colors. Don’t you just love it when there are so many damn colors on a blog that just hurts to look at?
• Header Image - You should always allow visitors to click your header image to bring them back to the main page. I don’t know if it’s a psychological thing or what, but I have noticed through heatmaps that visitors tend to click the “main header image” a lot to get back onto the original homepage. When I had this new design, I actually had a few of my readers contact me about implementing this and so I did.
• Navigation Bar - The navigation bar is where you see the links for Home, About, Contact Us, Faq, etc. Blogs usually have this bar at the top, but for companies or stores, putting it on the bottom is what you should do. Having this allows visitors to find out a little more about what the website is and the background/history of it.
• The Sidebar - This also depends on what type of website you have. A good thing for any website to have is a type of category option where visitors could just see what your website has to offer on the site rather than go through any other page. I can’t say more of what to have on your sidebar, but it really depends on what you’re going to do. Just make sure you don’t spam advertisements everywhere on the side.
• Heatmaps - Just a few sub-topics above, I mentioned hatmaps, but some of you don’t know what it is. Heatmaps are your friends because it tells you what your visitors click on and where they stop scrolling. A great site I use is CrazyEgg. It is a free site that allows you to checkup on your visitors without having any disruption to your website. I love this program because it allows me to know where to put links and advertisements. Some visitors click on things that aren’t even linked, so you should think of what to do there.

Benefits Of User Friendly

Don’t think of having a fully accessible website is a bad thing where you will not benefit from it. There are countless amounts of benefits you may be able to gain if you plan out a new layout for your website.

• Potential Traffic - A huge potential of new and old traffic is going to come back to your website when your site is more easily accessed. If you have lost visitors before, they may come back because you took your time to think about what your visitors want.
  
• Greater Feel - Everyone including yourself will have a great feel of your website. Opening a website that is less cluttered and more accessible just looks better than a website with a bunch of misplaced items and misplaced ads.
• More Money - As much as the MMO niche is starting to disgust me more and more, I think that some websites still make money whether they focus on it or not. A more user friendly website will bring in more traffic, which means more clicks on your newly well placed ads.

Downfalls Of User Friendly

As I have mentioned before, when there are benefits, there are always downfalls. It is simply inevitable because you want to gain more visitors by making your website more user friendly, but your current visitors or new ones may hate it because it may lack too much material.

• Less Professional - Although making your website more friendly is a good thing, some may consider it being a downgrade. Depending on how people think, some may say that having more crap on a website looks more professional while some say simple is better.
• Losing Visitors - You may actually lose visitors from changing your layout of your website, but you choose what is good for you. I think that making your site more user friendly would give you a more bigger potential to grow.

Examples Of User Friendly Sites

There are a lot of websites out there that are considered “User Friendly” and they don’t necessarily have to be blogs because blogs are actually very messy with all the content everywhere :-P. Since my website here is a blog, it would only be fair for me to give a few examples of blogs that are just sooo easy to navigate

Winning The Web (Gyutae Park) - The layout of this blog is just great. Gyutae would not be on this list if he didn’t change his header portion of the blog. His blog previously had a huge header like mine, but he changed it smaller and gave it a more accessibility feel.

John Cow (Bob) - I actually loved the John Cow theme more before because it was very unique, but after he began to sell his theme, I’ve been seeing it EVERYWHERE. The layout is very different and has easy access for any page of his site via the top navigation bar and the sidebar. The footer even has the Alexa stats and money making sites

Garry Conn - I talk to Garry quite often and I asked him why he changes his blog theme sooo much. What he told me was quite shocking from a blogger. He told me that he likes to test new themes to work with his visitors. Depending on what users click and where users scroll, he rearranges his theme.

Caroline Middlebrook - A new blogger with big big potential. She is already making anywhere from $1,000 USD a month to about $2,000 a month. She could definitely make more by putting more advertisements everywhere on her blog, but she chooses not to. Judging by her content, I would say she believes in content more. This is a plus because nothing is going to *flash* in front of her visitors’ eyes.