What makes a good website?
Your website is often the first point of contact for so many people and most people who have found their way to your site will navigate away too easily if there’s not something there to hold their attention. Good graphics are important of course, but what else helps to hold the attention of your reader?
Make your homepage feel like home
This is your opportunity to make a good first impression, making it too flashy or with too much content on it could result in an information overload.
- An outline of what is on your site, and where the reader can find it
- Contact details
- Why they should explore the rest of your site
Get people to come back, and back, and back
Once you’ve managed to get someone to come to your website once, you have to have something attractive to the reader to make them come back again.
Content
Make sure your content is credible and original. Try to provide new relevant content on a regular basis, so that there is something new for your reader when they come back to your site. Your content also determines the strength of your presence on search engines, and with so many people using search engines every day it’s important to make your presence felt.
Here are some ideas for keeping your content up to date:
- Providing a news digest (or blog), which keeps people updated on the relevant subject matter.
- Offering objective analysis and feedback on current events in your industry
- Listening to and offering feedback to your customers’ comments, concerns and ideas
- Inviting informed contacts to write articles for you
- Avoid using Flash extensively - its not as search-engine friendly as a clean, css-driven, standards-compliant website (like the ones Siyelo design)
Navigation
Link positioning should be logical, and when you click them they should redirect you to the right place. Siyelo does extensive testing to make sure that what your website does what it promises, and your software developer should offer this service too. The layout should be intuitive, and there should be a flow through your site which makes your audience feel instantly comfortable. Try not to litter your pages with hundreds of links.
Try to view the website from the customer’s perspective - if you were a customer how would you want to interact with the site?
Design
The visuals of a site are important, but unless they are supported by compelling content, easy navigation and good solid coding, visuals on their own won’t be able to attract people to your site and keep them coming back.
There are some annoying things that can make people navigate away immediately:
- Poor, dated or cookie cutter designs. Invest in a professional web designer.
- Intros designed in Flash
- Too many pop-up or pop-under boxes
- Autoplay music. Let your customer choose to play music, if offering it strengthens your message
- Busy backgrounds.
