What Makes a Good Website?

Making websites is what we do every day and to be successful at what we do means that we must think about what makes a good website every day as well.

The thing is, as it is second-nature to us, we very rarely quantify it. So we’ve taken the time to get some of our thoughts on the subject down in an article and would like to share them with you.

Immediate Impact

We live in an ‘instant’ world nowadays and the internet is the perfect representation of this. The home (or landing) page of your website should instantly capture the visitor’s attention. You’ve worked hard getting that visitor to your website so give them the eye-candy and a really clear idea about what you do before they disappear again.

Intuitive Navigation

Everyone loves mazes right? Actually no, not when it comes to the web. Make sure your visitors can find the information they want quickly and easily. Getting ‘lost’ in a website can be incredibly frustrating and not even being able to get past the home page will have most people hitting the ‘back’ button before you can say “let’s try that second link in Google”.

Although clever is cool and cute is appealing don’t assume that your visitors are as clever and cute as you are or that they will want to play ‘hunt the link’ for twenty minutes.

Appropriate Design

‘Appropriate’ is a subjective term but the principal is sound. Appropriate is what people expect to see. It doesn’t have to be ‘boring’ but a website shouldn’t be so off-the-mark that it confuses the visitor. A fair few business websites fall down when the personal taste of the creator or business owner/marketing manager/CEO has overridden common sense.

A website should never be the result of the input of just one individual. The best websites evolve through collaboration and the sharing of both ideas and best-practice.

Accessibility

Accessibility is principally about visitors who may see a website in a different way. Although doing things like providing alternative image descriptions for visitors who use screen readers is a must, we can also take the term and apply it web designers needing to consider accessibility from different devices (smartphones, tablets, touchscreen laptops etc.).

Giving a pleasurable experience for all visitors is what accessibility is really about.

Killer Content

A website is a vehicle for delivering great content. Enough said really.

Sales…

…or leads or conversions or enquiries or whatever you want to call them. Most websites really have one key purpose. It is easy to spot the websites where that purpose has been kept at the forefront of the development and the ones where tangents seemed to have been the order of the day.

“Keep focused on the true goals and don’t be distracted by shiny things”

The above quote is probably the best way of summing this entire article up. The best websites leave the visitor in no doubt about what they need to do next.

So there you have it, our thoughts on what makes a good website. Do you have any points we may have missed? We’d love to hear them! Either tweet us or use the comment system below.