Elements of a Good Website

A website's success depends on its design, content and and ease of use. Below I have tried to give the elements that are minimally needed to develop an effective website.

Content

The content of your website is the single most important component, poor content will affect both the way your visitors view you and the way that search engines will index you. Your content must be written in a way that provides your visitors the information they are looking for. Most people use the web to seek information, so make your site information rich. Your most important information should be easily and readily seen and easy to access.

 

Visual Appearance

First impressions are lasting impressions. A website design should be simple and clean with no distractions from the message you are trying to deliver or the action you want a visitor to take. Blinking icons or words, or lots of movement will likely distract people from your message and should be avoided. Pictures or a well designed slide show are okay (a picture is worth a thousand words) however be sure that they a relevant to your message.

Ease of Use

Your website should be structured in a way that the average user will easily be able to navigate it and find what they are looking for. An average site visitor will spend less that 30 seconds trying to find what they are looking for (yes, they are very impatient), if they don’t see it they click the back button and move on.

If your site contains a very large amount of content consider employing a site search tool.

Placement of Content

Again your website should be easy to read and visually appealing. Don’t place text over images, use a light background with dark text in the main content area, white backgrounds are best. It’s very tempting to try and dress your site up with busy or dark backgrounds and use white or some other color that compliments your background. Avoid this and your site will be both more visually appealing and more likely to be read.

Design as it Relates to Content

A well designed site will use a combination of xhtml/html/php and asp and using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Your site will be more appealing, more accessible, load faster and be much easier to update in the future. CSS allows you to make design and formatting changes for the entire site with one adjustment.

Cross Browser Compatibility

The most used browsers are Fire Fox and Internet Explorer, they are unique in the way they read and process coding. Fire Fox is much more forgiving, Internet Explorer does have some quirks and can drive you crazy. None the less you should test your site in at least these two browsers. There are many other less used browsers, if you want to test your site in these browser by all means do it. Keep in mind that the likelihood of being able to satisfy all browser requirements is slim. The use of CSS here will help you.

Website Optimized Image and Colors

Images:
Good image quality is important, it says a lot about you and your organization. Many people will compress their images for a faster load time. Just be sure that you are not loosing the quality of your image.

Color:
The safest way to ensure that your website appears just the way you want it to is to use “web safe” colors. Many of the newer screens can handle the equivalent of a print quality color scheme, but the older screens are limited in their interpretation of colors and you would be surprised to know how many of these screens are still in use.

Optimize Your Site for Search Engines

SEO is a very complicated issue, if you need your site to rise quickly in the search engines it’s best to consult an expert, it really is an art. You can also pay for higher ranking or use pay for click ads. Be sure you know exactly what you want with the latter as it can become very expensive and yield few results.

At a minimum be sure you are using well-thought-out keywords and phrases in your keywords tags, have page titles and description tags that reflect the content of your site and use the "alt" tag with all of your images. A site map will help spider/robots crawl your site, and of course rich content. Search engines and directories place a high value on well written content that provide lots of information.

Have Clear Contact Information

It should be very easy to contact you. Place your contact information strategically thorough out your site. Beware of using your email directly on the site, hidden behind other text or a submit button with the proper scripting or filters to ward off spam email harvesters. If you’re not careful you may end up with 100s of spam emails every day, then your only option is to change you email address.

Printer Friendly

Your site should be printer friendly without the use of a printer friendly button. This can be done through the of CSS.

Fresh Content

Change and update your content regularly. This will keep your visitors coming back to get the latest information, you may even get some referrals for your product or service from frequent visitors.

 

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