Over the years I've been involved in Joomla, I’ve seen some great improvements in templates. Many templates are now very sophisticated, slick and beautiful. Just compare the early work of any of the veteran template providers with their recent efforts to see the quantum leaps they’ve all made.

But while looks have improved, front-end usability -- hasn't. Many Joomla templates don't take usage into consideration. They’re missing some of the most basic features, making it difficult for novice developers to create a user-friendly site. I know I’m constantly hacking templates to make them do what I want.

This is the presentation I gave at the CMS Expo last week. Enjoy!

As I wrote in my previous post, PlentyOfFish.com is one of my favorite dating sites. It has great features, smart design (not pretty, but smart) and it’s highly addictive. But no site is ever perfect, so here are some of the usability mistakes I found on the site’s main features.

I am a big PlentyOfFish fan. I even got the chance to say that to Marcus Frind in person at the last iDate conference. As a dating site user for about eight years -- and as someone who has created a few dating sites myself -- I can say that when it comes to usability and making a site sticky, PlentyOfFish is one of the best.

Dating sites are among the most common types of commercial websites, and also one of the easiest to get wrong. When the competition is so tight, it's vital that the site is easy to use and that members are able to find and use the functions they want.

This is a useful presentation about usability testing. It also gives you an idea of how you could do it yourself if you wanted to.

Together with links, buttons are among the most common tools for taking action online. Almost every site has them, and far too many sites get them horribly wrong. Buttons should make it easier for people to take action, not harder!

Here are some of the more common button mistakes I've found on websites.

Usability testing asks users to perform set tasks on a website in order to measure the site's ease of use, the time it takes to complete those tasks, and the user's perception of the experience. Usability testing can be performed by users with different levels of expertise.

Sometimes small changes can make a huge difference in a site's conversion rate and its financial success. For example, if your "Buy Now" button is so small that no one can see it, no one will click on it. Placing it in the right location and giving it a more clickable look, can increase your conversion rate by hundreds of percent.

The conversion rate refers to the percentage of visitors who take a desired action such as subscribing, buying or joining. For example, the conversion rate of visitors that subscribe to a newsletter is the number of visitors divided by the number of subscribers. Clearly, you want your conversion rate to be as high as possible. The goal of usability testing is to help you to improve your site and raise that conversion rate. So if your conversion rate from visitors to buyers is 1 percent, making the changes we recommend could increase it to 2 percent... and double your revenues!