What makes a good website? To answer this, I will focus on three aspects: visual quality, content quality, and technical quality. Visual quality pertains to the general appearance of the website and its pages which affects the user experience. Content quality is what attracts your target readers the first time to your website. Then, it is also the reason they will keep coming back. Technical quality is about the responsiveness, trustworthiness, safety, and security.
Visual Quality
Clear branding image. The website should reflect the image the company wants to project with a good logo and domain name.
Good color combination. The colors of the background, fonts, buttons, and even images should blend well, consequently adding to visual appeal.
Readable typography. The font style and the font size should be easy to read.
Good visual layout. Current web designs use the grid layout. Because of this, organizing visual content into easily accommodated sets of information or images becomes easy.
Crisp and relaxing imagery. Images should be crisp and not blurred. They should also be relaxing to the eyes and not something confusing.
Simple. Simple is beautiful. Moreover, the visual image of the website should not create confusion in both the eyes and the mind.
No hindrances. Pop-ups and information on cookies may be good to the website owner but usually not to the readers. These often block a good view of the content on the page opened.
No overload. For simplicity, there should be no overload of colors, images, and texts.
Content Quality
This is what attracts your target readers the first time to your website. Then, it is also the reason they will keep coming back.
Clear target users. Especially on the Home page, the target users and the solution to the problems of the users should be clear.
User-centered. This means everything posted on the website is focused on making the experience of the user pleasant.
Clear answers to questions. Blog posts and other website areas must answer the questions in the minds of the readers for them to continue reading.
Search Engine optimized. With this, when target users search on Google, your website with its answers to the search could easily get to the beginning pages of the search results.
Organized Content layout. Information in the blog posts or anywhere on the website should be structured, categorized, and organized. As a result, your content will be easy to read and understand.
No overload. Once more, there should be no overload of information. Too much information, though needed can be scary and also not visually appealing to the eyes.
Technical Quality
Responsive. The website should be responsive to different devices—desktop, laptop, IPads, and mobile phones. Blocks should be able to move and fit the screen of the mobile. If so, your users can have full visibility of your site.
Crawlable. “Crawlability describes the search engine’s ability to access and crawl content on a page. If a site has no crawlability issues, then web crawlers can access all its content easily by following links between pages.”
Fast Loading. When one clicks on the website’s URL, the page quickly loads. It should take at least a few seconds to load. Users get impatient when it takes a long time to get to the desired page. Consequently, they may leave.
Trustworthy, Safe, and Secure.
– Uses Up-to-date software
– With SSL (reflected at the beginning of the URL. with HTTPS instead of HTTP only).
– Requires strong passwords for members
– Uses tools such as Cloudflare from DDoS attacks, etc.
To conclude, if you are a designer or a website owner you should consider these characteristics to make your website a good website. If you are a user, you can observe if these qualities are present in the website you visit and perhaps give constructive comments to the website owner or administrator.
Now, with all these written, I hope to achieve these qualities in this website and the others I have yet to build. So what makes a good website?
Just the above