Qualities for a great website

Not one aspect or marketing is more important than a Great Website, this aspect is your company’s front door.

What makes a great website?

1.   Design and Functionality 

Your site will reflect your company, your products, your services and ultimately your brand. So, it’s important to be visually appealing, polished and professional. Allow white space, uncluttered layouts with quality photographs and graphics for your look and your message shine through.  

Equally important, the site must work quickly, correctly and as expected. Build to web standards, proofread rigorously and test regularly for problems with speed or functionality. Every page should always be fast and functional, because any of them could be a potential customer’s first or only impression. Broken, slow, or poorly constructed areas will leave your visitors frustrated and encourage them to leave.

2.   Easy to Use & Navigate

People who visit websites are always in a hurry. Don’t make them work for information. Create obvious, logical navigation with clear intention. Use consistent layouts and visual cues for functionality across your site.

Your site should satisfy both ‘searchers’—coming for something specific, and ‘browsers’—just looking. Help users accomplish their tasks quickly with onsite search, and keep them engaged by suggesting related content and minimizing dead ends.

3.  Mobile Optimization

There are no excuses in today’s day and age, your site must look great and work well on any platform. The growth of mobile and tablet devices is not slowing down and you just don’t know what your next visitor will be using. Optimizing for mobile will improve both the experience of your visitors and your SEO rankings.

4.    Content That Is Fresh & Of Great Quality

Be brief, interesting and new. Use language that makes sense to your audience—avoid jargon, corporate speak and acronyms.  Visitors have short attention spans: spell correctly, be accurate, be relevant and update regularly. Blogs and Social Media updates are great ways to add fresh content, which keeps visitors returning and helps SEO strategy. Keeping things fresh requires a bit of investment. No, you can’t do without it, it will really help you in the long run.

5.  Accessible contact and location

Your audience won’t track you down. Make it easy for them to engage, offer multiple points of contact: phone, email, social media and maybe an easy-to-use contact form. A Google map is a bonus. Ensure that this information is readily available on an easy-to-find contact page—if not on every page of your site.

6.   Clear calls to action

If your site doesn’t ask anything of your visitors, they will surely do nothing. What is the purpose of your site? Is that purpose clear to visitors? Even informational sites want visitors to read and share articles, follow the company on social media, download toolkits, join mailing lists or learn more about the organization. Include an ask on each page. Make sure your calls to action are clear.

At AJ Creative Studios we believe customers should know they are at your website by the overall look done correctly, a website will work hard for your business and help you build your brand, your customers list, and your business.