What's in a name?

Human Factors. Human Performance Engineering. Usability. User-friendly design. User-centric websites. Is there a difference among these? From a practical standpoint, there really is not. The science of how humans interact with their environment and, in our case, with their computer systems, has taken on many names over years. "User-friendly" emerged as layperson's term for good system ergonomics and, as a result, it tends to be how most clients and end-users describe how they want site designed. They'll say things like, "we want a scalable, flexible design that is user-friendly." While this may be stating obvious, these are good concepts for clients to be supporting. The important issue is not really terms used to describe usability, it's understanding how it can positively affect outcome of your e-commerce initiatives…and, conversely, that, used ineffectively, serious impact it can have on your bottom line.

Usability. It's a science.

Usability is a science. Performance engineers are highly trained experts who combine graduate degrees (usually in Behaviorial Psychology or a related field) and several years of work experience in designing and testing interfaces and processes associated with computer applications. Seasoned performance engineers bring an interesting mixture of academic and practical skills to project team. And they are, most definitely, an integrated part of project team. Performance Engineers partner closely with strategists, marketing specialists, business analysts, content architects, and visual designers to infuse their thinking (following a defined methodology) into overall strategy and design of site.

Because it's a science, it's measurable.

1. Establish your site's main goal.

Your website can have several different goals, so long as you don't try to achieve each of them at once. For instance, say you want your site to attract more subscribers to your ezine, secure new customers for your products, and attract repeat visitors.

Pick ONE of those goals to focus on hardest, and make other two secondary goals. If you're relatively new at designing effective websites, start out by focusing on one goal ONLY, and forget others until next go round.

2. Use home page lead-ins to content-laden pages.

If your primary goal is, let's say, to secure customers for a new your product, you can lead visitors into that product in several ways. Here's an example:

Write an article on general subject matter of your product, including an eye-catching title -- read: HEADLINE -- for article. Then, create a page for it on your website. On your home page, post first few sentences of that article with a link to read rest of it on its own page.

Better yet, you could leave your article excerpt hanging in mid sentence to entice your readers to click deeper into your site to read article. (Just be sure article page loads fast.) Here's an example of an effective article excerpt lead-in:

--- In only one day, I had over 400 new visitors clamoring their way into my website. I didn't use search engines, ezine advertising, or spam, and it didn't cost me anything -- not one thin dime. So how did I do it? What was FREE...

Click here now to read rest of this article! < http://ExpertOnEbiz.com/articles/yahoosecrets.html > ---

If you've targeted your lead-in to attract your average visitor, who WOULDN'T want to go read that article?

3. Change your home page content and/or layout often.