Making A Good Website Great

Most website owners are happy to have a good website. A site that drives a reasonable amount of traffic, that converts and generally does the job needed. But in this day and age, good is very quickly becoming not enough. So what makes a good website great, we'll explore a few of the things required...

A Clear Design

You would imagine that every site would push to have a clear and easy to use design however this is often not the case. Many designs miss the boat when it comes to designing a site and will often put key elements such as a “Add To Basket” button hidden away.

The navigation will be poor and unfriendly. The colour scheme and finishing touches will be lacking.

Your site's design should be tailored to a goal. If it's to drive sign ups for an enquiry form then it should make that process as easy as possible. A poorly thought out design can break a website's chances of achieving its goal.

You should make your goal clear. Don't make the user think to find what they want.

User Journey

It's more than likely that in order to complete your goal, the visitor will have to navigate several pages. The journey they take through your website should be simple and easy to follow. This is most common on an ecommerce website where a user first has to find their product, add it to the cart and follow a checkout process.

This could easily span 8+ pages. Each one is another step in which the user could drop out due to a poorly thought out structure.

You should make your site easy to navigate and “fool proof”.

Page Speed

In the age of the internet, speed is everything, so if your website runs slowly and takes several seconds to load a page then users are likely to become annoyed and leave your site. Not only do slow loading pages frustrate potential customers/visitors, they can also be ranked lower by search engines as a result.

You should aim to make your pages load in a second or under.

Ability To React Fast

You should be able to make quick changes to your site in order to react to competition and the ever changing marketplace. A site that takes significant investment to change will only fall behind those sites that can push out changes in hours or days.

Don't use an inflexible system, make sure you can update your site on a moment's notice.

Don't Settle For Good, Be Great And Reap The Rewards

Pushing your site the extra mile is what will make the difference between you and your competition who think “good” is enough. A website is like anything in life, the more time and effort you push in to it then the more you'll get out at the end.

So don't settle, innovate, change and adapt and push your site beyond that of your competition.