One of the keys to a successful website is “usability”. Now a new report of UK high street brands has revealed that the Marks and Spencer and WH Smith sites are the most user-friendly.

The revamped M&S website has jumped from ninth place last year in the annual Online High Street Report. In third place in 2009 is John Lewis, while Boots the Chemist took fourth position.

For the first time, five of the high street brands scored more than 80% in the usability score, including the now on-line only Woolworths, which took fifth place in the survey.

Trenton Moss, director of Webcredible, the web usability consultancy behind the survey, is reported as saying that these days, especially during a recession, the user-friendliness of a retailer’s website could be the “key point of differentiation in a competitive market place”.

The criteria used to evaluate the websites included browsing, navigation, the checkout process, searching and product display pages.

The survey did, however, find a number of areas for improvement, such as allowing customers to alter the number of products displayed on a page and changing the colour of visited links.

Take note all your e-commerce owners.

Many studies of how users read text on the internet has revealed that they do not actually read. Instead many people scan the text – and especially when they are looking for business or company information.

A study of five different writing styles found that a website scored 58% higher in measured usability when it was written concisely, 47% higher when the text was scannable and 27% higher when it was written in an objective style instead of a promotional style.

Combining these three changes into a website that was concise, scannable and objective resulted in 124% higher measured usability.

So think about all of this when you’re writing your next piece of content for your website.

Tips for web writing: Ensure that you write in a simple, clear and straightforward manner. Include lots of sub-heads and straight-talking headlines. Bold up words if they are important. Don’t over-write but don’t under-write either. Research has shown that about 250 words is the optimum per page.

The bottom line is that it is better to employ someone else to write your copy if you are not experienced, as it will pay dividends in the long-term.