What Makes a Good Website?
What makes a good website? There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution to this, as it depends on what kind of website you have, who you want to target and what you want to achieve. Nevertheless, websites are still one of the main assets of any business. A successful website will allow you to stand apart from your competitors. To do so, it needs to grab the customers’ attention and quickly provide them with the information they need. Here are nine key factors that should be considered when building a website for your business.
Design and Content
1) Original Content
Original content should not only be based around what you are trying to sell but also your audiences’ interests. This will encourage customers to get involved, share your content with their friends/colleagues and come back for more. Furthermore, Google values content that is relevant and interesting for users. Therefore, creating original, exciting content is doubly beneficial when producing a successful website. Some companies decide to do this by writing articles or blog posts, while others create pages addressing frequently asked questions. However, it not much use having amazing original content if no one sees it, so it’s equally important to know how to optimise and promote it
2) Visual Design
Your website needs to be eye-catching! That means a well thought out colour scheme and high-quality images. The right colour scheme can go a long way in giving your visitors the best experience possible. While you need to be careful not to overdo the amount of colour on your website, as it can distract from the text and imagery, colour is something that needs to be considered before launch as it can brighten up and make most pages look less boring. Similarly, images play a huge role in the visual appeal and overall success of any website. They help create a much more professional and high-quality look, helping to communicate with your audience more effectively.
3) Accessibility
A modern website must be accessible so all types of visitors can use and benefit from your content. Screen readers and contrast which help people view websites have to be enabled. When designing and building your website it is important to continually test for accessibility, which is why this is built into our process from the beginning here at ClerksWell.
4) Structure
Most people don’t read a website, they just quickly scan through its pages. That is why structure is key in improving user experience. Hierarchy helps people identify the most important sections on the website, whilst headings help break up website content and by separating the text into small blocks will help visitors digest content more easily.
5) Search Engine Optimisation
SEO is vital in driving traffic to your website. Effective SEO takes time and effort to see results; they don’t simply happen overnight. However, in comparison to other marketing techniques such as cold emails or social media, SEO yields a much higher ROI. SEO efforts are usually accompanied by implementing strategies such as: optimising and promoting quality content frequently, backlinking, conducting keyword research to determine what your audience is looking for and cleaning up code.
User Experience
Not only should your website be visually appealing, but it also needs to be both functional and usable. This improves user experience, giving your customers a reason to come back.
1) Purpose
A good website design isn’t all about its visual appearance. Every page of your website should be useful to your visitor and help them in a productive journey- whether that’s to tell visitors about your brand, sell a product or give them the opportunity to get in touch. Companies need to ask themselves what visitors will be looking for when visiting their website and create the website accordingly.
2) Organisation and Navigation
A well-organised website allows it to stay clean and professional, removing any unnecessary clutter. Following a solid structure makes a website more accessible and user friendly, meaning that visitors will be able to better navigate their way through your website and find the content they need. If a user has to wander around your website to find what they are looking for they may get frustrated and leave. Thus, it is imperative to include an intuitive navigation bar or mega menu depending on the size of your website.
3) Speed
Users don’t want to wait for slow content to load; they want the information they need at the touch of a button (quite literally) and without delay. The main contributor to how fast a website performs is where/how the site is hosted. This is a really crucial discussion to have in the early stages of any web build project. In order to keep speed optimal, it is a good idea to review your website’s graphics, videos and audio to make sure it loads quickly. Speed is also a vital component of good SEO.
4) Tracking and Analytics
Metrics and website analytics give companies an insight into what’s going on on their website. Furthermore, measuring traffic helps to better target a website’s customers, generate relevant ads, and increase website conversion rates. One of the biggest advantages of analytics tools is that they allow marketers to determine whether your customers are completing an action or not on your website. This could be completing an online purchase, filling out a form or subscribing to your newsletter. In order to have a good website is it vital to track and understand what is working and what isn’t to make educated improvements.
A good website grabs the customers attention, encourages them to stay longer and browse different pages until they find the information that they need. While it may seem like a simple task, building an effective website takes a lot of planning and consideration.
Here at ClerksWell, we have partnered with Umbraco, Sitecore and Optimizely to create innovative, robust and functional websites for our clients. Our experts have been developing websites since inception, and we pride ourselves on our technical expertise.
So, if your website needs optimising or you’re looking to build the perfect website from scratch and want to talk to one of our experts about it, don’t hesitate to get in touch.