How To Design Your Website For Older People

Accessibility and useability are both big ranking factors for search engines these days, so no matter who your target market is, you would be wise to make sure that you’re thinking about a wide range of demographics when it comes to the design of your website.

But for those of you who consider older people to be their main audience, it’s even more essential to ensure that their sites are easy to use or you could find yourself losing out on some precious pennies as a result.

So how best to go about reviewing the design of your site and making sure that it’s as user-friendly as it can be for an older audience?

Firstly, weigh up the actual aesthetics of the site first – what’s it like at a surface level? It’s possible that visitors to your site could have vision issues, so perhaps consider using a larger font, for example. Making sure the font type itself is readable would be a good move, as well.

Other techniques include avoiding either centre or fully-justified text, not including large chunks of text in italics and avoiding overuse of different styles on pages and across your site.

Also think about providing captions, transcripts and low background sound to help account for vision and hearing problems that potential customers may suffer from.

Another point to bear in mind is that your site visitors may have problems with manual dexterity, with motor skills in decline. To help them combat this particular issue, make sure that any clickable elements on your web pages are big enough and not in close proximity to one another.

To help people keep track of where they’ve been on your website, what about using different colours so they’re able to distinguish between the links they’ve clicked on and those they haven’t.

And you might like to consider reviewing your contact and payment forms with an older audience in mind. Older people may well find these forms difficult to fill in, so consider using big text fields to help them, as well as providing clear and concise instructions regarding the information that may be required.

Another ranking factor you would be wise to be aware of, no matter your chosen demographic, is content quality across your site.

Search engines can now determine the quality of the content on your webpages, able to tell if it is too thin or if you have any duplicate content on your site. Do a quick audit of your site to see if any improvements can be made in this regard.

Internal linking is also something that everyone should be doing, as this will help people stay on your site for longer as they navigate their way around – helping improve your bounce rate into the bargain!

Call us today for help with web design in High Wycombe. To find out how Crisp can help you grow your digital revenue please contact us or take our Digital Scorecard and find out how you can get better today.