A Website that Communicates

We all know how important it is to have a website be able to communicate with the world. A good website just ‘does the job’ – a great website exceeds all expectations and thus has a far better return! The million-dollar question is however, what makes a great website?

Now what really makes a great website?

That really is the real million-dollar question. Many people have tried to tie this down to mitigating factors but at the end of the day, in my opinion – a great website is one which meets some of these criteria:

Content is easy to find:

It’s simple – if a user can’t find information they are looking for, they have no reason to be on your site. You need to make sure content is easy to find and in a variety of ways.  This makes sure the user experience is a good one and allows them to find content easily.

Original and fresh content that brings people back:

New content that keeps people coming back., whether or not they actually physically click on your site to see it, or read it through their RSS feed; they are still a visitor and they still have to be tracked! 

Google itself considers the freshness of a link a massive importance when determining Page Rank and relevance. Make sure you set yourself a blogging/posting/editing schedule and follow it to the best of your ability! SEO-wise, make sure you keep your homepage fresh and beaming with new content – but also importantly do not neglect your inner pages as well.

The Look and feel:

Unless you are an online giant who already has a user-base that will never deplete, like Google – you really need to make sure you look into your website design. It doesn’t have to be glitzy and glow; just appealing to look at. I mean you might have people looking at the screen whilst browsing your site or blog for more than 5 minutes on end. Do you want them to not come back because they found the site looked a little too 1998? I’ve seen numerous websites my friends have set up with an amazing idea, or great content that have simply given way due to the in-assurances that come along with badly-designed websites.

Things are where the user expects them to be:

This is an important one. If you can’t get your website to look ‘amazing’ – meet the user half way and at least promote a sense of structure and conformity. You need to make sure you set out your page elements to be where the user expects to see them. Unless you are going for an ‘outlandish’ theme or look in which you are trying to get noticed.  As long as content is easy to find, sections are split into bite-sized chunks of similarly-grouped information and your content area is the most-prominent section of your layout, you should be good to go!

Consistency in colors and scheme:

Make sure you try to keep everything consistent! Colors, headings, everything! Sometimes plug-ins, and other things like Google ads might not help you because they only allow you to change certain bits of detail. Don’t let that stop you from making sure everything that is in your power is consistent. There’s nothing worse than 103.1 different types of link styles. You don’t want one link to have an underline and one not!  Consistency above all means that users find it easier to connect to your website and also get a feel for how everything works and what stands for what.

Logical site structure:

Like any paper you have ever written, make sure your website structure makes sense. Top-down, there should be a logical flow. The header should come first, followed by navigation (if not already part of your header section), followed by the content with any sidebars or side-navigation, and ultimately followed by the footer of the page.

Purpose:

At the end of the day, if there is no purpose to your website, then it won’t survive for long. Find a niche if you can and tackle it. If you are dealing with something that is ‘way beyond your marker’ or something which is totally hard to place yourself in; whether it be ‘Web design’ or ‘Get rich quick schemes’; the process is the same: find a reason to bring visitors back for me! Whether it is super-cool, fresh, relevant content, or a cool flash game that people just can’t get enough of!

Everything you create online should have an ultimate purpose to succeed! 

Tracking and reporting:

Finally, great websites learn from their mistakes! Use tools such as Google Analytics to help you determine popular and not-so-popular sections of your website. See if you can get down to the reason why ‘x’ is not as popular as ‘y’.

There you go guys – another one bites the dust. Hopefully everyone is finding these at least remotely interesting and helpful when thinking about design.  Please digg/stumble this post if you enjoyed it.