As a business owner of any kind, your website will play a central role in how well you come across to new and prospective clients. But you may well be wondering what makes the distinction between a good and a bad website. Obviously, there are all sorts of different elements which we could discuss here, but in this blog post, we are only going to focus on a few of the most important ones. When you come to assess your website, you should look at each one, in turn, to determine how effective your website is currently being and whether there are any steps which you can take to improve things.
Strong Navigation
Often, when people log onto a website, they have a pretty good idea of what they are looking for. But if they are unable to find this with ease, this can be a major source of frustration which can end up causing them to log off and look elsewhere at the earliest possible opportunity. You should run some tests from people who have never seen your website before to work out how easily they are able to find things. While interactive menus are great, you don’t want to cross over the line into being annoying.
Visual Elements
The first thing that strikes most people when they log onto a website is what it looks like visually. You may only have a very short amount of time to impress your customers and grab their attention. While the animation is a nice touch to a website, you don’t want to go overboard with it - and certainly not if this ends up slowing down the running speed of your website. Any imagery which you put on there should look professional. Don’t forget about seemingly smaller details such as the font. Remember, you may only have a matter of a couple of seconds to create the strong visual impression that you are looking for.
Content
Next up, we have the content itself. As well as writing from an SEO point of view, you also need content which clearly explains exactly what your business does and makes it clear to users what you can offer them. You also need to be concise when it comes to making your points. Users are unlikely to spend a long time reading through pages and pages of copy while you get to the point.
Branding
Your brand should come across loud and clear on your website throughout all the different pages. People need to come away with a strong visual impression of your logo and colour scheme so that they instantly recognise you in the future.
Obviously, there are all sorts of other areas of web design which we could have discussed in a longer article, but these are just a few of the central ones which are worth focusing on in more detail.