When is a website a good website? I’m sure there are a lot of different opinions about the definition of a good website. What aspects should have priority over other aspects? In this blog I’ll write about various core concepts of what I think a good website should include. Do you think I’m missing one? Let me know, I’d love to hear about it 🙂
Content
The content of your website probably makes the most sense to be a core concept of your website. Without it, why would someone visit your website in the first place? Make sure the content is on point, give your customers or followers a reason to come to your website.
Good content should be authentic, easy to read and show authority over the subject you are writing about. Of course, it’s important to know your audience. If your audience like it straight to the point, save your lengthy content for the landing pages that Google will like and keep the important information at a no-nonsense level. If your audience likes to know everything about your subject, don’t hold back.
User experience
Your website should be easy to use by anyone. Your customers need to find what they are looking for within just a couple of clicks, you shouldn’t have to do math to change your website and your developer should not have to spend hours on decoding your code. I will elaborate much more about this in my blog “There are 3 levels of user experience“.
A good user experience should be as important as the content itself. A great written article is useless if the visitor can not find it anywhere on your website. Perhaps not totally useless, as it might have some SEO value to it, but we’re now talking about user experience within the website. The detailed content is often up to the customer to deliver, but it’s always a good idea to involve the developer, or even better, a CRO specialist, to improve the user experience through that content.
Performance
This is a core concept that happens “under the hood”, while being able to greatly effect the user experience. I’m sure you’ve had this happen before: you enter a website, see the button you need to click, but right before you click it, it moves and you end up clicking some other link. Annoying, right? This is called content layout shift and is one of the aspects that I consider part of the websites’ performance. Skeleton loaders are a great solution for this.
Loading speed is of course a big thing when it comes to performance. Whenever I have to wait 10 seconds for each page to load, I usually tend to leave the website. I’m sure others are like that as well, increasing your bounce rate (the amount of people leaving your website before any interaction). Improving your websites’ caching and image delivery is usually what will increase your loading speed the most.
Honestly, I don’t think performance has any lower priority than content and user experience. A website with pour performance will score lower on Google and will create a worse user experience, resulting into your content, great as it may be, not being read. In other words: reserve some of your budget for optimizing your websites’ performance.
Quality
Of course you want your website to look good. Even though the looks are part of the websites’ quality, it’s not what makes a website to be of great quality. How robust the website is build under the hood plays a big part of the websites’ quality. You can compare it with cars: if you put a Fiat engine in a Ferrari, you can’t expect it to still perform like a Ferrari. The engine of the website needs to have a strong core, so you can edit it, keep developing it and visit it with ease. This is when quality comes to play: if the hosting, code and design is of great quality, you create a strong engine that will last you a long time.
Quality of code if often underestimated in its importance. Good written code saves time. Adding new features to a project that in development world is often referred to as “spaghetti code” takes more time and has a bigger risk of having unexpected side-effects. Allowing your developer time to properly structure, refactor and comment code to make it easier to expand, it’s a win for you on the long run.
Scalability
More often then not, a company wants to grow. When growing, your website don’t have to be like your children’s shoes: you don’t need to grow out of it. If your website is build with your long term goals in mind, being totally ready for growth of your business, you don’t need to invest as much in your websites’ growth. New features will be easier to implement, but also certain features will already be prepared to handle bigger amounts of data.
A great example: In the past I had to work on a block that was build for them by someone else. It allowed for 9 “sections”, but they wanted to add a 10th. Instead of just expanding the code to allow a 10th, it would be better to build it into a flexible block that allowed as many sections as you would like. This will save money in the future when adding another section, but also makes it much easier to move the sections around.
Always keep the future in mind and invest wisely. You can always get some free advice on what your next digital steps should be, here to help!
