If you are a business owner, a website can definitely help you with reaching more clients and potential customers. So how do define a good website and a bad website? Here are 7 qualities that a great website would need.
1.Navigation
The menu elements should be easily accessible from any page, and the website design should be simple to navigate. The viewer should always know where they are on the website and have quick access to the places they want to go. A site map is a terrific concept, and if one is available, it will be used. This may seem obvious, yet most websites could need some work in this area. Other than accessible, the menu should also be more straightforward instead of a long menu offering various types of options and features for the users. The hamburger menu is one of the solutions – an icon that opens a side menu or navigation drawer. It provides a clear path for the user to take. This also increases the likelihood of the users as they have found the experience cleaner by browsing the needed information quickly.
2. Visual Design
People are visual animals; thus attractive visuals are an excellent approach to make your website more appealing. In your site design, scrolling text, animation, and flash intros should be utilized sparingly and just to stress a point for optimum impact. Most businesses have a distinct font or typography that helps clients distinguish them from their competition. Your choice of font while building your company’s identity might give your brand identity about what you stand for. However, the font you adopted across your website pages should remain consistent. Moreover, the font should be supported by common browsers to avoid displaying the website awkwardly as the users expected that we provide a seamless experience for different devices.
3. Mobile-Friendly Layout
Mobile devices (excluding tablets) accounted for 54 percent of global website traffic in the second quarter of 2021. As more individuals use their phones as their major source of web access, this tendency will only grow. As a result, a mobile-friendly style is essential in current web design. 85 percent of adults believe that a company’s website should be as excellent as or better than its desktop website when viewed on a mobile device. That implies that any website that does not adopt responsive design will provide a poor user experience, resulting in a loss of traffic, income, and credibility. And your website should deliver the same experience regardless of user device type. Practically, a mobile-friendly layout should allow website elements like images, text and user interfaces (UI) to automatically rescale and resize depending on the device used to access the website.
4. Speed Optimization
The bounce rate for web pages that load in less than five seconds is 38%. Conversion rates would decline by 7% if a load time is delayed by 100 milliseconds. As a result, optimizing all parts of your site for speed is crucial in order to shorten the time between click and content. Practically, it means websites are expected to load immediately, for example, optimizing all images to balance image quality and file size, using compression to keep files smaller and minimising HTTP requests in Chrome’s Developer Tools.
According to Google statistics, visitor bounce rates increase by 123 % as page load times grow from 1 second to 10 seconds. Despite the migration to more powerful 4G connections, “the bulk of mobile sites are still sluggish and overcrowded with too many components,” according to Google.
As a consequence, even minor efforts in website performance optimisation may pay off big, especially because Google now considers landing page speed as a ranking factor for mobile searches and Google Ads.
5. White Space
White space is an often-used element of modern web design. By balancing content such as links, text and videos with similar amounts of white space, the site will look clean, organized, readable, and easy to navigate. Visitors are considerably less likely to click through and begin the conversion process if they can’t find your product or contact pages. White space can also help focus users’ attention on the elements that matter most to your business. If you have a prominent product image or video at the top of your site, for example, you may use white space to differentiate it from other content. This makes it stand out from the rest of your site and emphasizes its value.
6. SEO Optimization
Many website design elements like meta tags, heading tags and other HTML coding hacks belong to the website’s back-end code. It’s critical that your web designers understand how to make your website operate in all major browsers, including how to use meta tags, alt tags, and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Many elements influence your site’s search engine ranking and aesthetic appeal, so make sure your web designers are up to date. The success of your website depends on your presence and exposure through digital marketing strategies such as SEO, social media, and email marketing.
7. Cross-browser and device compatibility
When a website fails to appear properly (as it should) across multiple browsers, browser versions, or operating systems, cross-browser compatibility issues arise. Cross-browser compatibility concerns arise as a result of the browser’s varied base engines. Different browsers pick what features they want to keep and what ones they want to remove from their systems. If a website still uses such features or has not updated to newer ones, it will not render properly, which will result in a loss of revenue. Thus, every design element being coded into a site needs to be displayed and function perfectly on every device and browser that the site is viewed with. Cross-browser testing is a basic rule to follow when assessing cross-browser compatibility. Cross-browser testing may now be done manually or via online services. It is entirely dependent on your user base and the eventual purpose of your website.
