Making A Great Website

When you consider it, the most impressive websites are USER-FRIENDLY. To impart proper site usability, you need to make sure of four things:
- Original, informative, current content
- Intelligent and intuitive structure
- Flawless, easy to use functionality
- Handsome yet simple design

Structure:
A well organised and orderly site is the most effective way to make sure that its visitors get the knowledge they want, or the goods they want to purchase (or both!). Decide what you would like people to do on your site – figure out the most common actions and hone in on creating a navigational structure that enables people to make those actions easily.
Your site’s home page is absolutely key. With crystal clear and simple structure and navigation, it needs to impart:
- the objective of your site
- your site’s contents
- how to find those contents
- (and if it’s an online store site) how to make a purchase

Unless it’s specifically appropriate to your site, try not to clog up your main page with an unnecessary Flash intro that takes a long time to load. And if you really think you just have to, just please make it easy to skip! Refer to the biggest websites on the internet and emulate them. Emulate their best aspects to stop your users having to overthink and change their everyday web browsing behaviour.

Balance the weight of writing or page length with the amount of levels in the site’s hierarchy. Never forget, the lower down a page is in the hierarchy, the longer the copy or information on that page can be, because users are already interested in your site. On more of a deep website that’s content heavy, putting in ‘breadcrumbs’ will ensure users always understand their position within the site.

Users proceed through a website in diverse ways. Some click large buttons, others enjoy using the navigation. And others choose hyperlinks in the text. Making sure there are numerous ways of easy to use navigation ensures that potential customers find what they’re seeking out. Whatever you end up doing, be confident it’s consistent across your site. Most web users don’t read websites – they scan them. There are squillions of sites on the internet and life is too short to read them all. Spend some time grouping the many types of content on your pages so that the groups correlate logically with what the audience needs. Make that method of categorisation applicable to the way your normal site visitor thinks. Try to implement a website navigation structure that’s tailored more to what the visitor is looking for, rather than to what it is you do.

Design:
Exuberant design is a fantastic thing, but generally the web is about finding information and transacting. An effective website’s design should add to those things, not obscure them. Some of the internet’s most popular sites (ie. Craig’s List) have a face that only a mother could love! But people still use them because they work.

Don't get me wrong, design something that appeals to the spirit of your intended audience. But while you’re doing that, focus on developing a simple, clean design that accompanies your core content, illuminates your website’s navigation structure, yet doesn’t overwhelm the user. And make it coherent! Websites that use a unnecessarily tiny typeface, or light body text embossed out of dark backgrounds or even worse, black body text on a dark backdrop are just making it all too hard.

Design isn’t all to do with what the site looks like, either. An important thing to understand is that Google's crawlers don’t read images; they read text. This means that to improve your site’s ranking in search engines, you can’t hide essential search terms inside nice images – they need to be HTML text.

Lastly, realise that effective web design isn’t just the arena of rich organisations. There are literally thousands of free and premium templates around on the web that can be accommodated to suit your objectives.

Content:
Sure, you want a gorgeous looking website, but in the end it’s your content that’s going to influence people and get your website its returning users. And how is great content best created? By putting your focus on your users' needs, instead of the goods you’re selling, and by allowing your audience to actively contribute.

Examples of what you can do to create effective content are:
- Writing analysis and/or commentary on your field or company that’s objective
- Asking noted industry experts to write articles/essays for your website
- Providing a current news feed on your industry or field
- Offering subscription to a feed of syndicated content that’s appropriate to your business
- Allowing your site’s visitors to contribute content through such things as forums, blogs, wikis, photos and videos, audio and reviews.

Now, look out at the furthest reaches of space and fill it with text and images. That’s around about how much information and products there are on the web (please don’t email us asking for the evidence to back that up!). If a person doesn't know exactly which site to go to, the way that people uncover that information or item is to Google it.

To attain a decent ranking in search results, you need quality content. This is due to the fact that search engines have long algorithms that figure out a website’s relevance based on their interpretation of its information. Each page in your website should be formulated so that they appeal both to your visitors and the search engines. You also need to include your targeted keywords and keyphrases so that the search engines’ robots realise the high relevance of your website to the keywords you’ve chosen as important in your area. Make sure you read our section on search engine marketing to learn more about this.

To keep the visitors returning to your website don't forget to update your site often or whenever trending subjects come up. People have got to have an incentive to come back to your website time and time again. You can get inspiration for new copy from trade publications, local blogs, or the Web, but DO NOT plagiarise. Search engines are smart enough to see through that!

Once off offers or sales make popular new content as well and give you a good reason to contact customers who have opted in to get in deeper contact from your business or organisation. Be sure to have a look at our section on electronic direct mail to find out more about this.

Functionality:
Functionality derives from the Latin word functio meaning ‘to perform’. In information technology, it refers to what a given product, such as a website, application or device, can actually do for a user.

In order to figure out the most important needs of a site’s functionality, simply ask yourself “What is the overriding intent of this website?” The purpose drives the function the site must fulfil, and the quality of functionality is decided by how effectively it performs that function.
After considering the site’s purpose, the functional aspects of the website must then respond to two equally important considerations:
1. What are the features that will profit your customers when visiting the site?
2. What are the functions that will help you when building your website and realising the work that you do on the website?

As an example, look at a site that sells women's clothes. From the visitor point of view, the ease of selecting and purchasing a good can drastically diminish the amount of cancelled sales, and the acknowledgement of returning users can help to increase repeat purchases. Functionality like ‘customers who bought this item also bought….’ can raise sales volume or frequency. Slick search and navigation will give people a greater possibility of finding what they came here for. The capability to monitor the progress of a purchase and to quickly sort out any issues or queries is also good to have.

If you were the site owner in the e-commerce women's fashion example, tools which help you get the order right and get it packed up and posted promptly to the proper address are essential. A good and accurate interface to the database system and a content management system that allows the site to be easily and quickly updated with new goods and new articles are also essential to the site’s victory.

In the technical arena, the real key to user-friendly functionality is simplicity and clarity. Graceless log in processes, badly designed transaction procedures, technical oversophistication and unnecessary repetition should be avoided. Never forget to make your user’s needs the focus of the site and you can't go far wrong. When proposing the implementation of a new feature to your website, ask yourself if it actually adds to the site’s ability to propagate its purpose. If the answer is not an audible and full-blooded ABSOLUTELY! Then you are probably better off without it.


Rick Crawford is a web designer who really knows his stuff.
Check out what makes a great website, or how to make a great website to learn more.