A website is one of the most important elements in your business, if you want to reach and educate your potential and targeted audiences. A well designed and successful website is determined by the amount of traffic and how long the user is staying on the website and learning about the services and products that you or your company offers. For all companies or any individual, the customers must come back more on the website for acquiring the services, products, information or even for referrals. This in turn helps your site’s ranking and SEO, thereby increasing your online presence. So what are the key components that separate a good website from a bad one, or from a good one to a great one? Here are the key qualities that a great website will need.
Purpose and Clarity
Before initiating the creation of your website, one has to create an outline of the purpose and goal of your website. Once the goal is clear, with a well-defined purpose, it is time to start moving forward with the design and the development process. With a clear understanding of what they want like:
- Management of the site
- Creating required and personalized content
- Type of information delivered to the visitor and how
Without understanding the requirements regarding what you are trying to accomplish, there is a risk of lack of direction and can potentially ruin your opportunity of positively impacting your customers, before they visit your website. Your targeted customer must be defined. Whether your target audience is the general public or is it someone from a specific sector of occupation.
Relevance and Context
It is important to create relevant and engaging content on the website to keep customers coming back to the website. Creating well-written content for visitors is one of the major elements in developing a high-quality website. One has to make sure that the content created is original, purposeful and it consists of optimized information that users and search engines need to read, view and share. The high quality and relevant content is recognized by Google’s algorithm and is rewarded with higher rankings. One has to focus more on the personalized content for the targeted audience to make it more interesting for them to visit more of your website.
Navigation
Any design should be developed in a way that is easy to navigate and the menu options are easily accessible from any page of the website. Any visitor visiting your website should know where they are on the website and have easy access to navigate where they would like to be. Another great idea is to create a site map and it will be beneficial if it is available. There is a very thin line between an interesting and interactive menu and an annoying one so functionality should be a focal point in any website you create.
Visual Design
Your users are more attracted to the visual expressions and displays and for this, the use of great graphics is one of the great ways to make your website more appealing. Any website has nearly 1/10th of the second to impress the customer and keep them there much longer. However, one has to understand that anything overdone doesn’t provide you with optimal results every time. Things like scrolling texts, animation and flash intros are few elements that one should use sparingly in their website and only to emphasize a particular point for the best effect and output.
Information Accessibility
It is not necessary that all the visitors are interested in exploring your whole website, they are there for a particular service or information. There is a possibility they might need the contact details or address or just a certain type of information only. This is the reason, it is very important to put the information in plain sight, in a format that’s easily accessible.
Interaction
A good design for any website engages the visitors immediately and keeps them focused on every page of the website, it also influences them in a certain way to contact you. This is called conversion and that is the ultimate goal for any organisation. Once again the level of interaction should never outweigh the benefit.
Branding
Whenever an organisation is creating a website, it should reflect your business and brand. Every visitor should be able to make a visual contact between your logo, print material and physical location. Because of all these elements, the website contributes to the memorability of the brand but also increases the level of credibility and raises the image of your business.
Social Media Integration
One of the best ideas is integrating social media on your website, this way it increases the engagement level between the visitors and the brand itself, it provides more ways to interact and share the content with other potential clients. For example, one can share the blog post link, which will, in turn, provide a way for the user to share your content. Through this social media integration, the brand awareness of an organisation increases and also creates an opportunity to get introduced to the people who might be unaware of you and your brand. You can provide an option of social login to the users as these websites allow you to login using Google, Facebook and some other social media platforms.
Security
There are certain ways to keep your website safe, some of them are mentioned below:
- Use HTTPS protocol, this helps to secure the communication between the users and the website over the internet. It makes sure that the information of any visitor is secure such as credit card information and other banking information online during payments.
- One should choose a safe hosting plan when security is a priority in websites as it is not made equal in all of them. For example, in shared hosting, it might be cheaper to use, but there is a possibility of getting hacked.
- Sometimes disaster will knock on your door and everything will come crumbling down, so it is better to have your website backup ready. Otherwise, you could lose all the content if it’s hacked or crashed.
By following these simple things it helps the security of your website and also it builds credibility to your website.
It is important to implement a few of the things in comparison to implementing none of them, but your primary goal should be to make your website great so that people would want to come back and buy your products or services from you. If your site doesn’t look impressive enough, incomplete or untrustworthy, it can directly impact your traffic and conversion.