Website Usability

What Does Website Usability Mean?

Website usability is a term describing the ease of use of a particular website or project. Looking at this issue touches a number of big concerns for today’s webmasters and developers related to how a target audience uses an online site.

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Techopedia Explains Website Usability

In a basic sense, website usability addresses the question of how "user friendly" a website is. Ease of use is an issue applied to almost any technology, but particularly to those systems that facilitate the use of new media such as the Internet. Good sites must have a user-friendly design and be accessible by the people who are using it.

One big aspect of website usability is responsive design. Responsive design addresses the idea of making websites usable by different devices, by larger display devices such as laptops and smaller display devices such as mobile phones. Across the Internet, website managers are using responsive design to help make their sites more accessible and user friendly to a wider range of visitors.

Other aspects of website usability involve best practices commonly acknowledged by web designers. These include the use of proper font size and color, as well as the design of content that can be scanned or read on a nonlinear basis. Some kinds of testing can also apply to a website usability process.

From small details like text layout to broader design issues like responsive design, improving website usability improves the bottom line of a website: how it promotes a particular use, and how it reaches out to visitors. Along with efforts in search engine optimization and visibility in prominence, website usability plays a key role in creating high-value web projects.

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Margaret Rouse

Margaret Rouse is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical, business audience. Over the past twenty years her explanations have appeared on TechTarget websites and she's been cited as an authority in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine and Discovery Magazine.Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages. If you have a suggestion for a new definition or how to improve a technical explanation, please email Margaret or contact her…