What Makes a Great Website?
What Makes a Great Website?
What are the essential traits of great Web sites? After you visit a site and find yourself staying awhile, what makes you stay? A sense of humor helps. Flashy graphics are nice. But the fundamental traits that make a site work are more elusive. This article will break down the essential characteristics of great Web sites into some easily followed rules of thumb.
1. Site Guidelines
Most of these guidelines are just plain common sense, which seems to be a scarce commodity on the Web. The attractive proprietary page-layout and text markup features offered by Netscape and Firefox as they leapfrog each other have seduced many a webmaster into jazzing up their pages, only to be forced to put “you must use Netscape/Firefox to view these pages” at the bottom. This could be rephrased to say “these pages look awful without Netscape or Firefox.” Stick with standard HTML (currently HTML 5) and your pages will look good on all browsers that support it.
2. Web sites should
Provide credible, original content in as many forms as possible
Original content is the most important trait of a great Website. Sites that provide only links to other sites are essentially meta-lists, while sites that have some information that’s useful to the user stand out and will be revisited.
Provide valuable, timely information to the user, not lots of data.
3. Be easy to read
Make your pages as easy to read as possible. Black textual content on a white background (as this page is set up) is the easiest to read.
4. Be interactive
Good interactivity engages the user and makes your site memorable.
Well-organized
Balance the number of levels with page length to minimize scrolling and display time.
5. Mobile Friendly
It is now commonplace to access websites from multiple devices with multiple screen sizes, so it is important to consider if your website is mobile friendly.
6. Last Is User Friendly
Usability has always been of key importance in a successful website. Websites with an intuitive design, and with images and aspects that are pleasing to the eye are going to attract more customers than those without these features.
