What makes a good website?

September 2005

There are a few things to look out for:

Web standards

Your site must be accessible in all browsers, not just Internet Explorer.

A bad designer says “most people use Explorer, never mind the rest.” You might be losing 30% of your audience! A good designer tests your website on all the browsers they can get their hands on – Explorer 4, 5, and 6, Netscape, Firefox, Gecko and Galleon, Safari, Opera, Explorer on a Mac – and makes sure that it looks right and does everything it should. The World Wide Web consortium has developed a set of global standards that browsers should be adhering to so they all display your website the same way.

A good designer makes sure that your site meets those standards.

At Sleek we always adhere to W3C standards – you can choose to display an icon on your site to say so.

Accessibility standards

It’s tempting to forget about blind and partially sighted visitors – people who use special software to “read out” web pages to them. Approximately eight percent of web users have a disability. Nearly half of those users are blind or visually impaired ( Georgia Tech, GVU WWW Survey, April 1998).

And there’s one very important visitor to your website who is blind – Google! I think you’d agree that if Google, Yahoo, or MSN came to your site and left because they couldn’t read it, that would be bad.

A good website is accessible to anybody who cares to visit.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has a standard for accessibility called Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). It defines what programmers should do to make sure that everyone can use your site, including blind and partially sited people, and including Google!

Sleek Services always builds to WAI Triple-A Performance standards as far as the client spec will allow.

Optimised Graphics

If a picture is too big (in file size) it will take a long time to load and drain your visitors’ resources, not to mention their patience!

We all remember waiting for a picture to download and seeing one line at a time appear in front of us and no one wants that! If a picture is too small (in file size) it will look grainy and cheap – and no one wants that either! A bad designer will take a picture as is and just put it on your site. A good web designer will use all the tricks they can to get the best payoff between quick pictures and pictures that look good.

Easy for visitors to find what they want

The best websites are clean, elegant and easy to use. A first-time visitor knows exactly where to find anything they want. If they can’t, you may as well not have bothered putting it there!

A bad web designer thinks they have to choose between navigation and being “artistic.” That is certainly no excuse and a good web designer is completely able to deliver both at once.

Appropriate use of technology

Technology should be a tool to serve us, not to make our lives more difficult! Sometimes its good to have flash and java and the latest bells and whistles on your site, but only if they add something in and of themselves. There is a tradeoff to using different technologies that a portion of your visitors will not be able to use them or will be turned off by them.

At Sleek our programmers have several years experience in Flash and Java and keep up to date with new technologies. We always make sure, though, that the technology serves the website and is never just there for its own sake.

Professional look and feel

Programmers program and graphic designers design. That’s really all there is to it! The skills needed for graphic design (creativity, awareness of space and form) are almost the exact opposite of the skills needed for good programming (technical knowledge, logical mind). The only thing they have in common is attention to detail – but what’s an important detail to a coder is invisible to a graphic designer and vice versa.

A bad website design company is a one-man-band working out of his back room. He figures he can knock a bit of code together, he’s got some clip art and he’s quite good at doing the layout, and that will probably be good enough.

Is it good enough for your business?

A good website design company lets people do what they are good at – the designer doesn’t touch the code and the programmer doesn’t touch the design. Of course they will discuss how the two interact and work together, but they will concentrate on what they’re good at and give you, the customer, the best of both worlds.

Security

Beware of web design companies who think that if it looks good on top that’s enough. If you are taking credit card details or even contact details then you need to make sure that no one else can read them. This is something a lot of clients take for granted but a terrifying number of cowboy operators send passwords, credit details and personal information in a clear, easy-to-read format, across the web for everyone to see.

If you collect data about people (even just contact details) you should have a privacy policy to explain what you do with that data.

Your web server should be secure.

Your website must have a point

This is so obvious and yet so many sites completely overlook it or fail to tell you what they’re for. Why do you have a website? What is your website supposed to achieve?

Here are some good reasons to have a website:

To sell my products to new people
To offer an information resource and position myself as an expert in my field
To offer a free report or e-book to introduce my company and gather names of prospects
To give people I meet in the real world a place to book or buy what it is I sell

Here are some bad reasons to have a website:

Because everyone else has one
Because I want to be able to see pictures of our business
Build “brand” awareness

Notice that all of the good reasons do something, and most of them do something for other people. The bad reasons are passive and have nothing to do with your customers or possible customers.

The most popular reason to have a website is to create a list of prospects – gather the names of people who are interested in what you do and would like to know more. That leaves you open to building a relationship and selling to them in the future. You can use your website to build the relationship as well by using autoresponder sequences. Usually this works much better than trying to sell to people cold when they don’t know anything about you.

A website designed to gather names must offer something of value in exchange for a person giving their contact details … you wouldn’t go handing your email address out to random companies for no reason, and neither would your audience. The most common is a free report or e-book which explains a bit of background about your industry and gives some advice and real information, ie what to do to solve the problem that you solve. It may sound like you’re giving away too much but in fact you’re giving away just enough and building your own credibility as well – now that they know what to do they need you to show them how to do it!

Does what you wanted in the first place

The best way to get exactly what you want is to know what your website is supposed to do and have ways to measure how well it is doing it.

That might mean collecting names for your list - easily measurable as you can see them in your mailout software.

It might mean converting visitors into sales - you can measure your number of visitors in your web stats reports and see your sales from your e-commerce package.

Whatever you choose your website to do for you, make sure that :

it meets web standards
it's accessible to everyone
it's easy and quick for people to use
that the look and feel projects the right image
holds your details and client details securely
your site has a purpose
you can measure how well it meets that purpose

Leanne Smith is a founder of Sleek Services, a popular web solutions service that builds intelligent websites for intelligent people. For more articles or to see what an intelligent, high-traffic website can do for you visit www.SleekServices.net.