Weekend Projects to Make Your Website More User-Friendly
For entrepreneurs, weekends are an opportunity to stand out from the competition by working on weekend projects. It’s a great time to focus on the user-friendliness of your website and make some changes that will improve the user experience. Here are ten potential projects that you can work on over the weekend to make your site more user-friendly by Monday.
1. Get User Feedback on Your Website
The first step to improving your website’s user experience is to understand what you could improve. You can use various tools to get user feedback, such as surveys or user-experience testing tools. The whole point is to see what people say about your website, allowing you to make educated decisions when it comes to modifying the UX.
2. Make Every Page and Post “Readable”
In the digital world, people aren’t as interested in reading anymore. Therefore, we need to construct a full weekend plan for scouring your website and adjusting anything that might not pass the “readability” test. Here are some tips to get you started:
– Find broken links and either redirect them to other pages or place content on those pages.
– Make your fonts beautiful by converting most of your online text to San Serif fonts.
– Evaluate all pages to see if enough white space is being used.
– Ensure you have some contrasting color schemes when placing text over imagery or colors.
– Use scannable techniques such as headers, short paragraphs, bullet points media to break up text and more.
3. Test and Adjust the Navigation and Search Bar
If you’re missing a navigational menu or search bar, now’s the time to include both. Over the weekend, you can implement an A/B test program or a heatmapping system. This way, you can run some tests to evaluate where your customers are clicking when it comes to your navigational menu and the search bar.
4. If Not Selling Online, Start Accepting Online Orders
One of the major points of having a website is to cut out unnecessary processes. For example, a massage therapist used to pick up the phone over and over to book clients in his schedule. But a simple booking plugin would cut out all of those phone calls. The same goes for physical products. Although it might be intimidating to sell online with your small brick and mortar store, start with just five of your best selling products, then see how it works.
5. If Selling Online, Offer Additional Payment Methods
An online store should absolutely accept every major credit card. However, several other payment methods may boost your sales by gaining access to smaller communities of people with more obscure payment methods. PayPal is one of the best examples, since many users feel more secure paying online with their PayPal accounts. Another example is Bitcoin, the decentralized, anonymous digital currency.
6. Construct an Easily Accessible, Comprehensive Support Area
Not all websites require knowledge bases, but every single site on the internet should have some sort of support area, or a compelling contact page. FAQ pages are nice for small blogs, and all support pages should have direct links in the navigational area.
7. Make and Fill Social Accounts (Then Link to Them on Your Homepage)
This one’s simple, but it’s more about spending the time to develop a content plan. The first weekend can be about filling the Facebook and Twitter pages. After that, you can ask how often you’re going to post. Which type of content is going to get the most shares? Stuff like that.
8. Walk Through the Steps Needed to Speed Up Your Site
Learning how to speed up your site not only impresses Google but it keeps your users around for a longer period of time.
9. Use Relevant Icons to Break Up Chunks of Text
These are the most basic of visuals, but they make such a big difference when it comes to UX. The WP SVG Icons plugin is a wonderful place to start, but you can generally look around on Google to find all sorts of free and premium icon packages.
10: Make Your Site Responsive
If you haven’t already heard, mobile users love mobile-friendly websites. In addition, Google will reward you for one. I suggest you find a WordPress theme that’s completely responsive. Most developers who are creating well-coded themes make them responsive from the get-go (like our Total theme for example). But if you’re happy with your current theme that it isn’t mobile-ready, consider making your current site responsive with the help of Jetpack.
Conclusion
Weekends are a great time to work on projects that will improve the user experience of your website. By focusing on user-friendliness, you can make your site more appealing to visitors and increase engagement. Whether you’re implementing A/B testing or adding new payment methods, there are plenty of projects to choose from. So, have fun this weekend and make your site more user-friendly by Monday!
