Usability Consultancy, Website Reviews, Website Optimisation

Is it just this industry or does every industry have it's forums where so called experts make life more complicated and confusing than it needs to be?

It's frightening when you read the conflicting advice in the SEO forums, no wonder businesses don't have a clue where to start, what is solid advice, what is pure speculation, what is rumour and what come from the 'horses mouth'. Notice how I avoided the term 'bull-sh!t'... It wasn't easy.

Optimising your websites for Search Engines should not mean designing/writing special pages for search engines and other pages that are optimised for your visitors. Optimisation for higher conversion rate and ease of use should, largely, be the same as optimising for search engines.

To compliment the page about Usability and Accessibility, here are a few links that you may want to have a look at relating, primarily, to Accessibility issues and guidelines for developing websites that are accessible to all.

If you read a lot of my articles, you will often see mention of 'usability testing'. Many people think that simply means that your website gets tested for things like

• Testing your website in multiple browsers

• Checking at different screen sizes and resolutions

• Checking all the spellings and punctuation

• Checking all internal and external links

However, there is much more to it than that, including the overall user experience, site structure, content relevancy etc., but here I am going to introduce another, very important, issue that we test when developing or optimising your website...