Make Your Website Great

When you boil it all down, the most popular webpages are USABLE. To impart effective site user-friendliness, you have to ensure four things:
  -  Fresh, educational, up-to-date content
  -  Ingenious and user-friendly structure
  -  Perfect, simple functionality
  -  Nice yet simple design

Structure:
A well organised site is the best way to make sure that its visitors get the knowledge they are after, or the goods they want to purchase (or both!). Define what you would like users to do on your site – identify the most commonly made actions and hone in on developing a structure that enables visitors to perform those actions quickly.
Your site’s landing page is key. By utilising crystal clear and easy to use structure and navigation, it must communicate:
  -  the purpose of your website
  -  your website’s contents
  -  how to obtain those contents
  -  (and if it’s an online shopfront website) how to buy an item

Unless it’s related to your website, don’t mess up your landing page with a useless Flash animation that takes forever to buffer. And if you really believe you have to, at least make it easy to skip! Refer to the most memorable sites on the World Wide Web and learn from them. Copy (but don't steal!) their greatest aspects to avoid your users having to overthink and change their usual web perusal behaviour.

Offset the level of body text or page length with the number of levels in the website’s hierarchy. Remember, the deeper a page is in the hierarchy, the longer the copy or information on that page can be, because users are already interested in your website. On a deep site that’s content heavy, putting in ‘breadcrumbs’ will ensure browsers always realise their location within your site.

People navigate through a website in different ways. Some users hit large buttons, others enjoy using the navigation. And others are more inclined towards links in the text. Providing different ways of simple navigation ensures that visitors find what they’re seeking. Whatever you end up doing, just ensure it’s consistent all over your website. Most users don’t read sites – they scan them. There are millions of sites on the internet and life is too short to read them all. Allow some time for grouping the different types of content on your site so that the groups categorise logically with what the audience needs. Make that method of categorisation suitable to the way your typical site visitor thinks. Try to develop a website structure that’s tailored more to what the visitor is looking for, instead of to what it is you do.

Design:
Polished design is a wonderful thing, but mostly the internet is about finding information and transacting. A website’s design should add to those things, not outrank them. Some of the web’s most popular sites (eg. Craig’s List) have a face that only a mother could love! But people still visit and use them because they work.

Don't get me wrong, design a page that is appropriate to the sensibilities of your intended user-base. But while you’re doing that, try to set your sights on implementing a simple, clean design that accompanies your main content, foregrounds your site’s navigation, and doesn’t avalanche your user. And make sure it's coherent! Websites that use a unnecessarily small typeface, or white body text inverted out of dark backgrounds or even worse, dark text on a dark background are just making it all too difficult.

Design isn’t all about what the site looks like, either. An important thing to learn is that search engines don’t read pictures; they read words. This means that if you want to improve your website’s rank in search engines, you can’t bury essential keyphrases within pretty images – they have to be HTML text.

Finally, consider that good-looking web design isn’t just the domain of cashed up companies. There are literally thousands of templates around on the net that can be changed to suit your needs.

Content:
Yeah, you want a good looking website, but it’s the content that’s going to influence visitors and get your site its repeat visitors. And how is effective content best written? By placing your focus on your users' needs, instead of the thing you’re offering, and by letting your audience actively contribute.

Some examples of strategies to create effective content are:
  -  Writing analysis and/or commentary on your field or organisation that’s objective
  -  Inviting noted industry experts to offer posts for your site
  -  Giving a content feed on your industry or subject
  -  Subscribing to a feed of syndicated content that’s relevant to your users
  -  Enabling your site’s visitors to write content through such things as forums, blogs, wikis, photos and videos, audio and reviews.

Now, picture the furthest reaches of the universe and fill it with text and images. That’s basically how much information and products there are on the net (please don’t email us asking for the evidence to back that up). If they don’t know exactly which website to go to, the way that most users uncover that information or item is to Google it.

To attain a high ranking in search results, you're going to need high quality content. This is due to the fact that search engines have very complex algorithms that figure out a website’s relevance based on their viewing of its information. Every page on your website should be formulated so that they relate both to your readers and the search engines. You also need to keep using your keywords and phrases so that the engines’ robots understand the high relevance of your website to the keywords you’ve deemed as important in your market. Don't forget to check out our section on search engine marketing (SEO) to learn more about this.

To keep the punters flocking to your website don't forget to post to your website at regular intervals or as soon as relevant topics come up. People need an incentive to return to your site time and time again. You can get inspiration for new articles from trade publications, local media, or the Internet, but DON’T plagiarise. Search engines are clever enough to figure that out!

Unique offers or sales make great new content too and provide you a good reason to get in touch with users who have opted in to get in deeper correspondence from your business or organisation. Don't forget to have a look at our section on email marketing to find out more about this.

Functionality:
Functionality derives from the Latin word functio, which means ‘to perform’. In IT, it refers to what a certain product, such as a website, software application or computing device, can actually do for a user.

If you want to pinpoint the most important requirements of a site’s functionality, you need only ask yourself “What is the overall intent of this website?” The purpose describes the function the website has to enact, and the quality of functionality is decided by how effectively it performs that function.
After consideration of the website’s purpose, the functional features of the website must then work with two similarly important considerations:
  1.  What are the features that will benefit your users when using your site?
  2.  What are the functions that will advantage you when building your website and realising the work that your business does on your website?

For example, consider a site that sells women’s fashion. From the user perspective, the ease of looking at and purchasing a product can reduce the number of failed sales, and the recognition of repeat customers can help to speed up returning purchases. Functionality such as ‘customers who purchased this item also bought….’ can boost sales volume or likelihood. Bang-up search and navigation will allow people a greater possibility of finding what they're seeking out. The capability to track the progress of your purchase and to easily sort out any problems/bugs or confusion is also important.

From a site owner's perspective in the online retail women's clothes example, tools which help you figure out the order and get it packed up and sent rapidly to the correct address are key. An intuitive and accurate interface to your record system and a content management system that allows the website to be easily updated with new goods and new content are also vital to the site’s victory.

On the technical side, the best key to interactive functionality is simplicity and clarity. Annoying log in processes, counterintuitive e-commerce procedures, technical complexities and unnecessary reiteration should be avoided. Never forget to make your visitor’s needs the focus of your site and you shouldn't go wrong. When looking at the creation of a new function to your website, ask yourself if it actually adds to the site’s ability to propagate its stated objectives. If the answer is not an audible and vehement DEFINITELY! Then you are probably better off without it.

Want to know more? Find out what makes a great website, or how to make your website great.