From Functionality to Design: Understanding What Makes a Good Website
Are you confident that your website provides visitors with a great experience from start to finish? A well-designed and user-friendly website builds trust and credibility for your business and encourages potential customers and other connections to take action.
In this article, we’ll explore the most important principles of what makes a good website, why they matter, and how to get it right.
Why is Having a Good Website So Important?
In today’s digital age, having a professional business website is essential to your success.
- According to Forbes, 78% of all businesses have a website
- According to Statista, Google is the most frequently used search engine, with a 93% market share in the UK
- It’s estimated that Google processes approximately 99,000 search queries every second
So, what if all those people actively searching for your products and services online, can’t find, navigate, or use your website?
Optimising your website for search engines, user experience, and the needs of your business is critical if you want to attract visitors, maintain their engagement, and achieve your target conversions to meet your business objectives.
What Makes a Good Website?
While every business and website is different, there are some fundamental features you should apply to strike the right balance between design and functionality.
1. Great Branding & Sleek Design
Your website reflects your organisation. If your site looks professional and is loaded with useful information, readers will see you as an authority and expert in your industry. Likewise, if the site is poorly designed and structured, or even out of date, they will make the same assumptions about your company.
Your website should highlight your brand and your products / services with a clear and consistent layout and navigation. A good foundation could begin with the use of grids to compartmentalise your design and two or three base colours. Limit your font options to no more than 3 and emphasise your elements by taking advantage of white space. Most of all, remain consistent within your design.
2. Clear User Journey
When we talk about user journey or user experience (UX), we are referring to the totality of the visitors’ experience with your site – more than just how it looks. UX includes how easy your site is to use, how fast it is, how easy it is to navigate and find information, and how little friction there is when visitors try to complete whatever action it is they’re trying to complete.
Your website navigation should focus on nudging the right visitor towards the must-have experience. To perfect the user experience from start to finish, you should first identify your target market, your end goal and how you want your visitors to get there, and how your content can be optimised throughout to attract the right people and enhance their journey.
3. Effective Calls-to-Action
Many unsuccessful or out-of-date websites lack effective calls to action that convert users to customers. A call-to-action (CTA) is a button or link that you place on your website to drive prospective customers to complete an action.
The most successful websites never leave site visitors wondering what they should do next. If the next step is not subtle and intuitive, users will leave and never return – and that’s sadly a lost business opportunity. An effective CTA is clear, specific, concise, and compelling. For example, “Sign Up for Our Newsletter”, “Download Our Brochure”, or “Buy Now”.
4. Technically Sound
If you built your website more than 4 years ago, most likely it’s far behind in terms of looks and functionality. It probably has outdated code that can slow down its loading speed – which may, in turn, impact your ranking in the Google search results. It may also not be compatible with some of the latest popular browsers.
With an effective content management system such as Umbraco, website owners can easily update their site without the risk of causing errors or the need for new, complicated code. This way, you can personally add to or switch your content based on your specific goals, while constantly optimising your website.
5. Fast Loading Time
Your website’s loading time is a major factor in people either staying or leaving the site and never returning. While a loading time of 1 second or less usually means a positively low bounce rate, this can increase by around 32% for 1 to 3 seconds, and even more if the site loads in 5 seconds.
This makes performance one of the most essential website design best practices for businesses to follow. A variety of factors can influence page speed, and thus affect bounce rates and visitor engagement, including:
- The quantity and size of images, videos, and other media contained on the page
- The themes / plugins installed on your site
- The coding and server-side scripts
6. Mobile Responsiveness
The UK is now a smartphone society. We’re spending two hours online on our smartphones every day; twice as long as laptops and PCs. If you factor that with the mobile-first indexing update from Google, ignoring the mobile market is a very risky business. It’s now considered the most common practice to make a website mobile-friendly (responsive design).
Mobile responsiveness is crucial for optimising a website for search engines and providing a seamless user experience. Otherwise, you may be driving mobile users and potential customers away. By using a mobile-responsive design, you can ensure your website is accessible and usable on any device, helping you reach a wider audience and improve your online visibility.
7. Quality, SEO-Friendly Content
The goal of every search engine is to continuously crawl sites and search for new content to help users find the best, most relevant answer to their search query. It’s all about having useful, quality content that answers the user’s question and makes them stay on your page and interact with your website for longer.
That’s where quality, SEO-friendly content matters. By writing strong, optimised keywords into your website’s page content and metadata, Google and other search engines can appropriately index your website and raise your position in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Then once visitors have clicked on your site, it’s crucial to keep them engaged with quality content.
Website Design by FWD Motion
What makes a good website can vary from business to business. However, there are plenty of fundamental elements that can help you build a solid foundation for creating a successful website that aligns with your goals.
Our Web Development Team excels in building innovative websites that put your business at the forefront online. Using the latest software and technologies, we can solidify your online presence and increase website traffic so you can grow your business.
Get in Touch
We’re an experienced web design agency in Sheffield. To learn more about our website development services, please get in touch for a chat and a quote.
10/04/2024