Talking Point: What makes a good website?
What makes a good website? Nottingham-based BCS Digital's account director Simon Williams suggests five areas to be considered.
1. Create a strong user experience
Before a website goes into production, it is essential that time is spent carefully considering your audiences and their goals and needs. The mistake people make here is assuming they know what the audience wants, or even worse, they make the site deliver what the business wants. Getting in front of your users and finding out their opinion is a great way to ensure you focus on the right areas. This can be done in many cost-effective ways, such as focus groups or online surveys.
Following on from this, time needs to be given to how, where and why content is structured in certain ways. Key customer journeys through your site need signposting to users so as to ensure that they can achieve their goals easily. A slick and quick journey through a website ensures no frustration on a user’s part – it keeps them on the site and it gives them a pleasurable experience, increasing the chance of them recommending the site to peers and friends.
2. Create an engaging design
There are some beautiful websites that actually fail to heed the needs of the audience (see above). Yes, a design can be groundbreaking and innovation should always be encouraged, but the design needs to work for the user. Any design should always be evaluated against the audience of the site. A design shouldn’t be approved just because “it looks good” or “looks cool”.
3. The right technical platform
Without going into too much tiresome technical detail, most site owners nowadays want a content managed website (a CMS). There are multiple CMS systems out there, the right one needs to be chosen, and chosen on the basis of the following considerations:
• Does it give the site owner the power to amend the content they need to edit on a regular basis?
• Does it provide an easy-to-use interface for people to create and edit content in?
• Does it place too many restrictions on how the site can be designed and built?
It is vitally important that the site owners are comfortable with the chosen CMS. If they feel there are barriers to editing and creating content then they are far less likely to do so, and, as such, the site can rapidly stagnate and appear outdated from a content perspective.
4. Good search engine optimisation
Ranking well in search engines for key searches that your users are likely to submit is vital. A lovely-looking, well-built site is no good to you if no-one knows it is there. Optimising your content on the site to help build a positive ranking is an art, much like copywriting. There are many examples of sites that look and work fantastically well but suffer from poor exposure, simply because no-one has considered how that site will be marketed or made visible to its potential audiences.
5. Strong social media presence
People no longer absorb digital content just by going to traditional websites. Facebook now receives more visits than Google on a regular basis. Twitter is gradually expanding its appeal and widening its demographic and LinkedIn’s gradual evolution is beginning to pay dividends. In short, more and more people consume their daily digital content through social media. For a vast majority of businesses, social media is something which requires attention. It will rapidly reacha stage where more and more businesses will lose customers/audience by not engaging in social media.
6. Success or failure?
The success or failure of a website will ultimately boil down to how much time and effort is spent on it. A key fact to remember is that simple is best. Ensure you focus the site on your audience and implement it in a robust manner. Most importantly: make sure people know it is there and keep the content up to date, relevant and engaging.
Simon Williams is account director at creative agency BCS Digital, which has offices in Nottingham and Sheffield.
