What makes a good website?

People always ask ‘What makes a good website?’ and I always flip the question back onto them. The reason I do this is that subconsciously we all know.

The next website you visit, ask yourselves the following questions:

• What made me visit this perticular site?
• How easy was it for me to find?
• Did I remain on the site?
• Did I find what I needed?
• How easy was it for me to find the information I required?
• Is it slow to load?
• Do I trust this website? Why?

There are loads more questions you can ask yourselves while browsing the internet but I will break down a few points in which I think creates a good website.

Purpose

Before anything else, you need to know what purpose your website serves.

Are you selling something? Are you providing information regarding your services? With your purpose outlined clearly, this will give you a much clearer direction in which your website needs to be designed and function.

Also, ensure your website is providing valuable information. You may attract your visitors with a nicely designed and functional website, however, if the information on your site proves not to be valuable, everything else means nothing.

Easy to use

This may sound obvious but there are many things that are overlooked which are causing your visitors to never return to your website.

How many clicks does your visitor need to take before they reach the information they need? How long does it take to checkout?

User Experience (UX) is very important when designing your website. Visitors don’t want to spend too much time looking for what they need, so let’s try and make it as easy for them as possible.

Design and Functionality

A well-designed and functional website makes it more memorable. A good website ensures it is on-brand but also takes into consideration User Experience.

A website should also have an uncluttered layout and use high-quality images when required. It should be also built to web standards, use clean code, and be optimized for search engines so it can be found easily by your target audience.

Responsive

Your website should look amazing on any device or platform. There are no more excuses. Having a responsive website means that your site will readjust itself depending on what size screen it is being viewed on. This has now become the standard in web design.

Speed

This is something that gets overlooked however the average user expects a website to load within 2 seconds maximum. In this day and age, we expect everything instantly. If we have to wait longer than a few seconds, we’re more likely to go elsewhere.

There are many things you can do to optimize your site for faster load times. You can compress larger file sizes, optimize images, ensure your website is built using clean code, and use a reliable and trustworthy web host.

Let’s Sum Up

The web is always changing, so it’s our job to ensure our site keeps up. So many factors play into having a good website, it needs to look good, work well and be able to convert visitors into customers. If you’d like to work with a reliable, trustworthy company with years of experience in this industry, then feel free to reach out to us and we’ll be happy to discuss how we can help.