What Makes a Good Website?
Your Website Checklist
If you run a website you obviously want to reach as many people as possible. But not every website can make that instant connection and build engagement straightaway.
Often, visitors only stay for a short time and disappear, maybe forever. A high bounce rate, low dwell time, and few returning visitors are signs that your site could use some optimisation. But what makes a website user-friendly and engaging? Because it’s not just about having a great domain name, you need the right web design, programming, and editorial choices to bring it all together.
Define Goals and Target Groups
In order to design an outstanding website, it is worth investing some time in planning beforehand and answering the following questions:
- What are my goals?
- Who do I want to reach?
Whatever your focus is, whether sharing information, selling products, or creating customer contacts, it should drive the structure, design, and content of your website. To help you, here are some general criteria that you can follow to create a convincing website.
Choose a Memorable Domain Name
The domain name is the foundation for any successful website. The shorter, catchier, and more memorable it is, the easier it is for users to get to your site. A good web address should be no longer than 20 characters. It shouldn’t contain abbreviations, complicated words, numbers, or special characters, and preferably no hyphens. To choose the right domain name, consider keywords that describe your company and what you offer.
Create Interesting Content
If you want your website to be convincing, you need to have content that appeals to your visitors. All your content, whether text, images, audio, or video, should be up-to-date and fit your website’s theme. A wedding photographer’s site should have examples of pictures, while a food blog creates appetite appeal with recipes and helpful videos.
Regardless of what content you want to share, it helps to plan it all out in advance. Every piece should answer the reader’s W-questions (Who? What? When? Where? Why? What for? And w how?) as clearly as possible.
Alternating types of content make your website more engaging, giving your users a better chance to grasp the content. Mix things up by using different formats and media such as text, tables, graphics, videos, or even podcasts.
Pay Attention to the Structure and Layout of Your Website
All content on a website should be as long as necessary and as short as possible. But sometimes, especially for complex topics, long blocks of text cannot be avoided. When this happens, it is vitally important to keep sentences short and simple. Try to break up your message into distinct sections with short, readable paragraphs as well as subheadings to signpost what you’re talking about. Highlighting key text in bold helps readers grasp the most important statements. Correct spelling, language, and punctuation underline your credibility and are a must-have, especially for corporate sites.
Encourage Interaction
Visitors to your website don’t only want to be given information, they also want access to clear, engaging lines of communication. It should be easy to get in touch, whether via a contact form that is easily accessible from every page, through prominently linked contact options, or other ways that make sense for your particular site.
A comment section or social media options such as sharing and liking are especially important for blogs. On the other hand, a webchat can be great for business for a quick exchange with customers. While a search function makes sense for very extensive websites such as wikis, letting users quickly find the website content they’re looking for.
Use a Timeless and Functional Design
Engaging content is important, but it also needs to look right to reach and retain visitors. You shouldn’t overload your pages with too much content; leaving enough “white space” ensures a calm, coherent user experience.
Similarly, your website’s colour scheme should use contrasting text and background colours for readability, as well as making sure the overall use of colours harmonise well with each other.
Whatever colours you choose, make sure you use them consistently according to predefined rules. For instance, if you have a logo, it makes sense to match your website’s colour scheme to it. It’s also good practice to not use more than two or three different colours in the layout of a website. Accent colours can be used for links and other things you want to highlight such as subheadings. Make sure your links are instantly recognisable, so they get the attention you want.
Finally, think about what font you’d use. Public directories such as Google Fonts contain a large number of freely available fonts to choose from for select your website. Consider starting with a font like OpenSans, which is frequently used on the web and will be familiar to visitors. But whatever you choose, remember that readability and uniform use of the font is key.
Design a Clear Navigation System
You want visitors to your site engaging with your content, not spending their time trying to find it. So make sure you have an easy and consistent way for them to get around. Ideally, you want to keep the position and structure of your navigation the same throughout the entire website, as well as on both desktop and mobile versions. That said, it can make sense to use sticky navigation (fixed when scrolling) or fold-out navigation as space-saving alternatives for mobile sites.
Keep your menu navigation clear and clutter-free: Ideally, a visitor can reach his or her destination with just a few clicks, i.e. the navigation consists of a maximum of three levels. And as much as you may want to show your website’s personality, stick to words with clear meanings for navigation and key links, otherwise, you could end up losing your users.
Ensure Your Website’s Accessibility
First impressions count: If users call up a website and it takes too long to load, they may leave or approach your content and services in a negative frame of mind. The goal should be that the user can interact with a page within two to three seconds.
You also want to make sure your website works almost everywhere. That means setting it up to work with both desktop and mobile devices (this is called a responsive website) as well as checking that it works across all common browsers and with all standard screen resolutions. Other things to check about for accessibility include usability features like maintain uniform design, good contrast ratios, clear and simple language, as well as more technical ones like offering text alternatives (e.g. for images, videos) and filling in the meta-information of a website.
Secure your digital assets
Your website needs security. It needs SSL encryption, not just because it protects the data you and your users share, but if you don’t have one, modern browsers will displaying a warning whenever someone visits your website. Not an ideal first impression. You can also protect your website by keeping web applications up-to-date, making regular backups and security checks, and using secure passwords. By securing your website against hackers and malware in this way, you protect yourself and your visitors from viruses, Trojans, etc.
So, What Makes a Good Website After All?
No one thing, but everything in harmony. The appearance, functionality, and content of the website should all work towards the same goal. Neither a beautiful design with poor content nor an unappealing website with great functions will succeed in the long run.
As you can see, it’s not simple to create and maintain a good website. So, before starting your next online project, it’s worth asking yourself whether you want to do everything yourself or whether it might be worth getting outside experts to handle individual tasks. Whatever you decide to do, we wish you good luck on your online journey!
You May Also Like
