A Good Website If you run a website, you want to reach and convince as many people as possible with your content. Here you can find out what is particularly important!

The Checklist For Your Website

Frequently, visitors linger and disappear forever — a high bounce rate, low dwell time, and few returning visitors are signs that your site may need tweaking. But what makes a website a user-friendly Internet offering visitors appreciate and use frequently? In addition to the correct domain, the web design, editorial aspects and website programming play a role here.

Define Goals And Target Groups

To achieve a website that is as user-friendly as possible, it is worth investing some time in planning and answering the following questions: What are the goals of my website, and who do I want to reach? If I wish to disseminate information, sell products or establish customer contacts has a significant impact on the structure, design and content of my website. Nevertheless, some general criteria follow to design a convincing website.

Choose A Short And Concise Domain As An Address

The domain name is the basis for the success of your website. The shorter, catchier, and more memorable it is, the easier it will be for users to access your website. A good web address should not be longer than 20 characters, contain no abbreviations or complicated words or foreign words, numbers, umlauts or special characters and, if possible, no hyphens. Use keywords that describe your offer, your name or company name and the appropriate domain extension.

Offer Interesting Content – Tailored To The Target Group

If you want to convince with your website, you have to offer your visitors appealing content. Whether text, image, audio or video – the content should be up-to-date and fit the website’s topic. As expected, a wedding photographer’s website would contain many pictures and information about the photographer’s services, prices and equipment. At the same time, a food blog could convince with understandable recipes, appealing photos and helpful videos.

Answer Wh-Questions And Stay Varied

Regardless of what content you want to present on your website, it helps to plan and structure it in advance and to question the added value for the user. The text should answer the reader’s W-questions (Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? What for?) as clearly.

Alternating formats increase the attractiveness and allow your users to grasp the content quickly. Use different forms and media; these include:

• body text
• listings
• tables
• photos
• graphics
• videos
• podcast

What Makes A Good Website Structuring Texts, Laying Them Out And Writing Them Correctly

All content on a website should be as long as necessary and as short as possible. Long texts are sometimes unavoidable to present complex topics. Then it is essential to pay attention to quick, non-nested sentences and to insert a paragraph or a subheading after five to seven lines. Bold highlighting helps to grasp the strong statements more quickly. Correct spelling, language and punctuation underline the credibility and seriousness of the content presented and are a must-have, especially for company websites.

Offer Opportunities For Interaction

Visitors to your website want to provide information, and communication with one another is also essential. It should be easy to get in touch, for example, via a contact form that is easily accessible from every page or prominently linked contact options. Comment or social media functions like sharing and liking are essential for information offerings like blogs. Companies, in particular, can use a web chat to exchange with website visitors and customers quickly. Users can quickly find the desired website content with a search option, which makes sense for extensive websites like blogs and wikis.

What Makes A Good Website The Design: Timeless And Functional

Exciting content is essential, but this content presents appropriately to reach and retain visitors. The start page and all subpages should not show too much content crowded – the so-called white space ensures a calm, coherent overall impression and helps the user find their way around. Open web designs without limitations are currently the trend, but it is advisable not to display the content too broadly, even with available designs, so that it remains legible.

What Makes A Good Website Colours, Contrast And White Space

A webpage’s colour scheme should contrast the text and background and use colours that work well together. The colours use consistently according to predetermined rules. If a logo is present, aligning the website’s colour scheme with it makes sense. It is recommended not to use more than two or three different colours for the layout of a website—colours used for links and other highlights, such as subheadings. The links, in particular, should be recognizable to generate the desired attention.

Check The Font And Size For Legibility

A font commonly used on the web and looks familiar to visitors, such as OpenSans, will keep your website safe. Public directories such as Google Fonts contain various freely available fonts from which you can choose the right one for your website. The legibility and uniform use of the font is fundamentally essential. Good legibility achieves with a sans-serif font that is at least 14 pixels in size.

Use Consistent, Clear, Not Too Deep Navigation

Visitors to your website should be able to find their way around the first time they visit it. The position and structure of good navigation remain the same across the entire website in the respective version (desktop vs mobile). In the mobile version of the website, a sticky navigation (fixed when scrolling) or a fold-out navigation can make sense as an alternative to the desktop version. In any case, the user should be able to see exactly where he is on every page. The menu navigation must be straightforward and not too overloaded: This is possible if the visitor can reach their destination with just a few clicks, i.e. the navigation consists of a maximum of three levels. Meaningful labels for navigation points and links are a must to design user guidance optimally.

Keep The Loading Time As Short As Possible

The first impression counts: if users call up a website and it loads too long, this lousy impression quickly transfers to the content and services offered. The aim should be for the user to interact with a page within two to three seconds. If the loading time is longer, this quickly leads to aborts and disappointed visitors who do not return. The loading time is crucial for mobile surfing because the bandwidth of the respective mobile network can also increase the loading time.

Example: Impact of loading time on conversion rate (CVR)

A/B testing of Mozilla’s downloads page: After implementing the changes in an A/B test, the optimized experimental variant reduced the average page load time by 2.2 seconds and increased download conversion by ~15%!

Ensure Accessibility

If you want to design your website in a contemporary way, ensure it is displayed correctly on devices such as PCs, tablets and cell phones. This responsiveness is now one of the standard requirements for a good website. The site should also work in all common browsers and standard screen resolutions. Criteria for accessibility are also the offer of text alternatives (e.g. for images, videos), a uniform design (e.g. for headlines), a reasonable contrast ratio, straightforward language and the filling in of the meta information of a website. Further requirements for barrier-free surf find in the Barrier-free Information Technology Ordinance ( BITV 2.0 ).

Keep The Website Secure And Up To Date

A website’s security increases visitors’ trust: SSL encryption prevents browsers from displaying a warning when they visit your website. The continuous updating of the web applications, regular backups and security checks, and secure passwords also ensure quality. By protecting your website against hackers and malware in this way, you protect yourself and your visitors from viruses, Trojans and the like. Compliance with the established W3C quality standards is also a must for the technical requirements of a website. The global Wide Web Consortium is a worldwide community whose staff and member organizations work with the public to create and continuously develop web standards.

Against the background of the new European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) introduced on May 25, 2018, data protection on the web has become even more critical. External scripts provide locally, if possible, and tracking tools and data collection via the website and their processing must comply with data protection regulations. Current data protection guidelines should be available on the website, and order data processing contracts may have to conclude with external providers.

What Makes Distinguishes Good Websites

• Good websites have the following characteristics, among others:
• Clear goals and clear target group orientation
• A content-related, simple, short and easily remembered domain
• Interesting, varied and up-to-date content that is target group-oriented
• Texts that are not too long and structured by subheadings and emphasis
• Plain language with correct spelling and punctuation
• Visible interaction and contact options
• A calm, harmonious, well-contrasting, but not too colourful and dense design that sets accents
• A legible font that uses consistently
• A consistently used, clearly labelled, non-rambling navigation that takes into account the specifics of both desktop and mobile versions
• A short loading time, a responsive design and surfing that is as barrier-free as possible
• SSL encryption, compliance with security standards and data protection compliance

Conclusion

In general: the appearance, the functionality and the content of the website should interact, i.e. support each other and not hinder each other. Neither a beautiful design with destructive content nor an unappealing website with great functions will convince you in the long term.

Creating and maintaining a good website is a complex challenge. Before starting a web project, ask whether you can or want to do everything yourself or whether individual tasks outsource sense. On the way to your homepage, you can, for example, leave the design of your website to a professional web designer or use a website builder or a management system to simplify programming and configuration.

HELPFULL RESOURCES: The Types Of Websites And How To Design Them

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