Elements of a good website

Since you already have the answer to the question- Do I need a website? Now let’s see what are the elements of a good website that make a website stand out from the competition. After all, your website is your online office, you want to design it as impressive as possible.

After reading this post you’ll have the answer to the following

Your website is like your storefront. If you have a shoddy storefront nobody would like to enter. Ask yourself, would you enter a shoddy store? No. Probably you would move onto the next more refreshing, more inviting store. This is exactly why your website must have a welcoming look and feel.

Even the placement of products could affect the sales. A planogram for your store is important so why not something similar on the web? (Yes, we are guilty of exploiting the human behavior!!)

A good design is not about how good it looks but it’s about how good it sells!

Here are the essential features for a good website design.

Looks matter. Fact!

The website needs to be visually appealing and leave that perfect first impression as soon as the tab opens. The look can be vibrant and full of colors or clean & simple with lots of white space. It will depend on the type of business, target audience and website purpose.

Needs to be a piece of cake

How many times did you buy that complex software and cursed yourself before you finally got the hang of it? But you did it, because you were obliged to; your website visitor is not! Don’t make the visitor think, no one really wants to take that pain. Some key points to make the experience smooth:

Navigation: Navigation or menu for your website needs to be clearly thought about. You can opt for a few main pages or a multi level menu which organizes your content in the right manner. The menu items should be placed in a way that the user checks the right page easily (or travels through the pages you would want him to).

Load Time: It is difficult to hold the user long on a web page. And if the website does not even load on time, then there’s a 99.9% chance that the user will close the tab. So the load time should not be compensated for high end graphics or video. And also use optimized coding techniques to improve load time.

Readability: The most obvious point that even a 5 year old knows, but is often overlooked. The choice of fonts, colors and backgrounds can sometimes affect readability of the text. Choosing them wisely is important and make sure smaller screens do not affect the same.

Use Headings & Image: In the best case scenario will the user read everything word by word. In most cases user will first scan the content to know if there is something useful. Help the user scan through the content easily, use headings, sub-headings and images to understand the content in a single scroll.

Content

Arguably the most important part of your website is content. Keep your content short and crisp. Complementing the text with images, infographics or video can be more engaging and easy to understand for your customers. Be sure to maintain a consistent tone and style.

The content should be useful – think about what the visitor might look for when s/he is on your website and provide that content readily. But at the same time it should be actionable. Visitor should know what to do or where to go next. Call to action buttons with relevant text should be placed in between and at the end of the content.

Think (about) small

More and more people are accessing the web through mobile devices like smartphone and tablets so optimizing your website for smaller devices is not a ‘good to have’ feature but a requirement.

With the new technologies and hardware improvements in place, these devices have much more power than before. A good website design should have features that take advantage of this and enable users do more from a smaller screen.

And that’s not it, having a mobile-friendly site improves your ranking in Google and other search engines.

People are judgemental

A good website design is one where the credibility of your website and an organization in a whole is established. The best part is, that it is really easy to do that on a website. Good content and visual design would keep the user glued and the rest depends on how well you showcase your products and services.

You can also use image gallery, customer testimonials and a clearly stated About Us section for this. You can also display your social media channels. Alternatively, check your website for errors: spelling, grammatical or coding bugs.