10 Elements of a Great Web Site
Date of Update: 05-23-2013
Creating a great web site requires some specific elements. These elements help to create a web site that will increase your sales, visibility, and effectiveness as a company. Review these elements below and begin creating your great web site.
1. Clean Visual Design:
Web design is extremely versatile. There is no limit to the amount of functionality and design elements that can be added to a web site. However, there is one saying I live by when designing web pages, “Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.”
There are many web sites out there that have way more design elements than necessary. These sites portray disorganization, inefficiency and negligence. Even if the companies who own these sites are efficient and organized, a poorly designed site can depict the opposite.
Clean visual design starts with an efficient layout. Only add elements that are necessary to the content you will be sharing. Choose a color scheme that will be pleasing to the eyes and easily viewed on the web. When considering images, ensure those images are visually appealing to your mass market and fall within the design scheme you have chosen.
2. Valid and Creative Logo:
In an effort to find a logo, many people are misled by thinking they can just find an image on Google and use it as their logo. The issue with downloading images from a Google search is that most of those images are proprietary. This means the image and the copyrights of the image are owned by someone.
The best way to avoid an image associated lawsuit is to create a logo from scratch. Specific sites also allow you to purchase images for your web site. Remember when creating or purchasing your logo, keep the image relevant to your company and your site content. Don’t forget to follow the color scheme you set out for your site when you created your design layout.
3. Functional User Interface:
User interface is often referred to as UI. The UI of a web site is the interface through which a user communicates with the site. If the user attempts to interact with a web site and encounters errors or strange navigation, there is a higher chance the user will leave the site.
Functional UI consists of working links and intuitive navigation. On the average, users spend 10 to 20 seconds on a web site. However, if the site is designed with exceptional UI and has relevant content, sites can easily increase those numbers.
4. Prominent Primary Navigation:
In order for users to find their way around your site effectively, the main navigation needs to be prominently placed. It is a good idea to place the navigation either at the top of the site or on the left side. Both of these locations are familiar to users and are easy to find as the location is above the fold.
The fold of a web site is the portion of the site which is shown when first entering the site without scrolling down. The primary navigation of your site should be clearly visible above the fold.
Additionally, the primary navigation should remain consistent throughout each page of the site. This will help to give your site familiarity to the users and help the users to continually find what they are looking for.
Some sites place an additional navigation in the footer. When doing this, the footer navigation should be a duplicate of the primary navigation. The use of the footer navigation is to ensure the user has an additional way around the site when they have scrolled to the bottom of the page.
Another alternate way for users to easily find their way around your site is to provide a sitemap. A sitemap is a page that contains links to each page of your site in one location. Many large sites implement a sitemap for the users convenience.
You should be aware that a footer navigation and sitemap are not replacements for a primary navigation. The primary navigation should always be highly visible and accessible on the site.
5. Relevant Content:
Content is the meat in the sandwich of your website. When writing content for your site ensure it is relevant to the site and informative.
Long sections of text that span the width of the page are more difficult to read than text that is broken into two or more slim columns. Additionally, breaking content up into short sections with bold headers makes it easier for the user to find and read the information they need. Text can also be broken up with images, quotes, and videos. When using these tools to break up your content, ensure they are relevant to the content you have on the page.
6. Call To Action Links:
Call to action links on a sales or membership focused site are equal to the call to action in an ad. A call to action has specific words that make the user take immediate action, such as “Click Here”, “Sign Up Now”, or “Buy Now”. If you are creating a sales or membership related site, the site would be incomplete without these links. In effect, without the call to action links, the site becomes a place for your customers/users to land without giving them directions to move forward.
7. A Descriptive About Page:
An About page typically has information about the company. This can range anywhere from a description of the company and its services to a lengthy backstory about how the company was formed. Remember to include information that describes how the company is a benefit to the user.
8. Contact Information:
Some sites place their contact information on the About page. Whether you place your contact information on the About page, create a specific Contact page, or place the contact information on each page, does not matter. The most important thing about your contact information is that you have it on the site. You can even place it in the header or footer of your site.
9. Cross Browser Compatibility:
There was a time when everyone used Internet Explorer (IE) for their web searches. But according to recent data, IE has dropped to 12.7% of users. Alternately, Google Chrome has taken the lead with 52.7%, while Firefox holds steady with 27.9% of users.
These are the three most popular browsers. There are several others, like Safari and Opera, but these along with their counterparts are a small piece of the browser puzzle.
Because there are several browsers that are being used, it is important for your web site to look and work properly in each of them. Testing your site during production in the three top browsers will ensure you have compatibility across each of them. This practice is called cross browser compatibility.
10. Analytics:
Analytics is the practice of tracking your web site views. A good analytics program will give you information like the number of visits to your site, whether they were unique or repeat visitors, average visit duration, and number of pages per visit.
In addition, these programs can tell you the locations of your viewers based on language, country and city. Finally, it can provide information on which browsers are being used to view your web site. This is helpful in your cross browser compatibility.
If used properly, analytics can give you tons of information and allow you to tweak your site when needed.