Usability is a fancy term that describes how “user-friendly” your site is.

Think about this: if a user gets frustrated trying to use your site, they will go elsewhere. Worse, they will develop a negative feeling towards your company. You will have lost a potential customer.

Instead, your site should be encouraging users to explore your site and come back again and again. This means that they should be able to easily and quickly find exactly what they want without having to think! In other words, your site must be transparently useful to them.

Your visitors are going to form a first impression about your site—and your organization—within four seconds of visiting your home page. Your home page must, at a glance, direct your users to what they are looking for without them becoming frustrated or intimidated.

After giving your visitors a great first impression, give them a reason to start exploring your site. Provide a helpful overview of your site that allows your visitors to feel confident and in control of their experience. Give them tantalizing links that draw them deeper into the site. The longer visitors stay in your site, the more likely they are to become customers.

Flash intro pages are just about always a very bad idea.

More often then not, they prevent the user from quickly accomplishing what they came to the site for, frustrating and annoying them in the progress. Very rarely are users impressed with Flash pages. They are slow to load, require a Flash plug-in (which not all users have), and generally stop the user from promptly getting to where they want to go.

Honestly, do you enjoy sitting through a Flash introduction? Why risk creating negative feelings? Flash pages more often than not translate into lost customers which mean lost dollars.

What’s more, search engines may not be able to properly index your site if it has a Flash intro. Do you really want to risk low search engine rankings?

All this being said, Flash intro pages can work very well for certain media-oriented sites such as artist sites or entertainment sites. Visitors to these types of sites expect a graphic intensive experience.

A user-friendly site offers uncluttered layout, painless interactivity, clear navigation, good feedback, is quick-loading and engenders credibility.

The following are some of the many considerations that can help make your site more usable:

• Provide a clear page layout that is consistent across all of your web pages.
• Display your logo and tagline in the same spot on every page (usually the top-left).
• Provide a consistent and predictable global navigation scheme on each page.
• Provide an overview of what your site offers on your home page.
• Frequently update your homepage with new content. Keep your visitors coming back for more!
• Provide multiple ways that users can find content.
• Ensure that pages load quickly, even for those visitors using dial-up modem.
• Use a consistent and effective color scheme, (preferably one that is color-matched!)
• Provide recognizable and useful hyperlinks.
• Accommodate user disabilities.
• Last, but not least: Your site should behave predictably. No annoying surprises!