Contributed post
Today, if you’re an online business owner, you’ll often find it’s less about whether you have a website and more about whether you have a “good” website, yet this idea is very subjective and many business owners struggle to understand what “good” looks like in the context of their website.
For instance, whilst we all know the difference between a visually ugly and attractive website, the visual aspect is not the only metric on which to judge a website – after all, you can have the best looking website in the world, but if your website loads super slow, or is incredibly confusing to navigate, people aren’t going to engage with the site and are going to bounce off (meaning exit your website without exploring further).
The challenge is that many business owners, and some graphic designers consider that as long as their website looks nice, then it is a good website, whilst other business owners and programmers tend to be of the view that as long as it’s functional and fast then it’s a good website – yet these components are like Yin and Yang; they both must be balanced in order for the website to perform optimally.
Of course, there are companies like Rouge-Media that understand all the nuances of what makes a good website, and can advise you accordingly, but if you’re attempting to create your own website, without expert guidance, there are a few cornerstones of a “good” website that you might want to consider.
SPEED
The amount of time that is spent waiting for a website to load is usually minimal, nowadays, simply because people don’t wait – they just click off. In a world of superfast broadband and 4G on mobile devices, we are not accustomed to waiting for content to load anymore, and if your website is taking its time to display there is likely an issue with the back-end of the site that is causing it to underperform.
The reason load times are critically important is that today people have much shorter attention spans than they once did – in fact, research shows that if a website hasn’t loaded within just three seconds, people are likely to click off. Furthermore, they are likely to make the inference that your brand isn’t professional or trustworthy… it’s like walking into a shop, to find there is nobody around, or no products on the shelves.
In most parts of the world, people have access to fast internet speeds, but some people living in rural areas (even in the UK) their internet does not load as fast as it would in a developing country such as India – so don’t assume everyone has fast broadband to download your content, and ensure you optimise your site to load as efficiently as possible by using tools such as Pingdom to test speed and address slow loading components..
One of the leading causes of slow loading speed is having to pull through high resolution image files that haven’t been compressed, though, as with most things when it comes to optimising load speed it’s pretty easy to compress JPEGS into smaller files, meaning they will load much faster.
CONTENT ARCHITECTURE
Think of your content architecture in the same way you would a hotel, in that you want things to be sensibly organised so as to avoid confusion and make it easy for people to find their way around.
When you have a lot of content or a broad range of products on offer, it can feel overwhelming and hard to categorise this information in tiered chunks of content, but there is an easy and effective way to make your content architecture more user friendly.
Let’s say that you run a vehicle sales website, for instance, you could chunk the content in terms of different types of colours of vehicle – though that wouldn’t be particularly relevant, so you need to chunk higher than that, and think more to the type of vehicle. For instance, if you came onto a website and found Cars, Buses, Motorbikes – you could very quickly and easily work out which way to go… and then, the tiers of content could unfold deeper as you browse through.
The key point is that you want to make it as easy and intuitive for people to find the information they seek as this increases user engagement.
AESTHETICS
It’s important to remember that “good” website design is functional meaning it shouldn’t distract or overwhelm users; the design is there to support the content around the site – rather than be design for design’s sake.