Websites

There are quite a few websites now that seem to forget that not everyone has the faster internet connection going.

Some websites feel that having flash and all the most modern things means that it is the best thing for the customers. In some cases it means that a customer may leave the site even before the actual content is loaded because of how long it takes to actually load the home page. The other issue with some of the modern pages is they aren’t even compatible with the mobile devices. Not every device has flash as part of the system. We use a Blackberry for work and we have found that there are a number of sites that we don’t see anything due to flash/java not being part of what we have.

Websites need to ensure that they are compatible to a number of devices both desktops, laptops, tablets and mobile devices. Making sure that it just works on the latest and greatest doesn’t mean that it is going to work for everyone and that is something to consider. When you are designing a website try and get a few people to test it using different devices before it goes public. To ensure that a website is compatible with mobile devices there are tools that can help with that. This is the one that I have used and found that it is pretty simple to use. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/ It gives you a score and also a list of things that you might or should consider fixing to make your site mobile friendly.

Another tool that I have used is https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ which is a page speed test. This will help you see how quickly your page will load on both mobile and desktops. It gives you a score out of 100 and a list of things that you should or might want to consider fixing. Being able to preform these tests will help you see some of the issues that someone using your website might come across.

These are just two of the different tools that are out there for helping ensure that a website is user friendly. As a business you want to ensure a potential customer experience is good on your website as in some cases your website will be the only thing a potential customer sees. If they run into too many issues navigating the site they may avoid you as a business due to the issues that they dealt with.

Remember, your website is how a lot of potential customers will evaluate you as a business. If you don’t have a good experience on your website they may never give you a chance to be a business they use.