What makes a great website?
Published: 2021-12-31 10:36:01



Minimalistic Design

Minimalistic does not mean just reducing the design elements. Minimalistic means creating the same usability with minimum interface elements. It means establishing the perfect balance between aesthetics and functionality without compromising. It is the balanced distribution of content and graphics/images along with the effective use of colors and clear readable fonts. The objective is to give the visitor just everything that is needed, without creating chaos and confusion. Not to forget minimalistic design also comes with the benefit of faster page load time.

Responsive Design

'Responsive' as the name, truly means a design that is RESPONSIVE. Responsive to the changing device size without doing any deliberate effort and still maintaining the page integrity. With every single audience of website owing multiple devices - Laptop/Tablet/Mobile etc it is difficult to decide which device would be used to view the website and at the same time, a business cannot be stubborn to force the user the device they want them to see the website in. So RESPONSIVE design is the baseline in today's world.

Website Speed Optimization

Page Speed or load time plays a very key role in user experience. It also helps is improving Google Page Ranking but before that what is of utmost importance is that the audience for which the website is created gets a wonderful user experience when the wait for the page load is reduced drastically. It is very much workable but following standard industry practices. As per Google Researchers, 0.4 seconds page load time is long enough to cause users to search the page less. Another study says that your 25% visitors will move away if the page takes more than 4 seconds to load. User comes to the website looking for information that they are searching for and if they have to wait for long or find someone else who delivers it faster, they will never come back.

Intuitive Navigation

Navigation is for guiding the visitor to reach where he wants to. It works exactly as the on-road navigation system. The driver creates visual markups to identify wherever they are. BREADCRUMBS help serve the same purpose. So BreadCrumbs are very important for an effective navigation. Humans are known to forms patterns in their mind. Thus the navigation should be CONSISTENT and UNIFORM across the website. It helps the audience get the familiarity and adaptation which makes the life of visitor easy.

Ease of Visibility and Accessibility

We all are accustomed to saving frequent locations in our navigation system. QUICK LINKS serve the same purpose. It gives users easy access to the most required links and a quick way to reach them. Based on user usage patterns it is very important to have QUICK LINKS across the site. Some other concepts that are very widely used and makes navigation effective are VISIBLE BUTTONS, INTERNAL LINKING, SIDEBARS, CALL-TO-ACTION etc which should give the audience an excellent user experience.

Browser Compatibility

There are the host of web browsers available in the market for desktops and mobile usage. Browser compatibility refers to the process of making the website compatible with various standard browsers providing the audience the same seamless feeling irrespective of the browser the website is accessed from. A good browser specific understanding and minimalistic design combined together generate an experience that is worthy enough to give a wonderful experience to the website visitor.

Search Engine Optimization

If I want visitors to the site, I need them to know that I am there. SEO practices do the same job. They help the website gain top ranks on search engines based on the searches made by the users. This is an easy and straight way for the visitors looking for something that you offer, come to your website. More visitors means more possibility of conversions. There many factors like Keyword quality, website usability, metadata etc which contribute to this.

Website Content

So let us say you have a very good looking website with optimized speed and minimalistic design. All good and the audience has reached the spot they were looking for. What next? Is all done? No, what comes now is the heart of the website - The Content. The visitor will now look for the information or product for which he came looking for. Inappropriate content or the non-interactive presentation of the content will put all the efforts made in bringing visitor here will go down the drain. The content needs to be informative, latest, to the point and relevant. Apart from the quality of content, the presentation of the same should also encourage the visitor to go through it. Visual and interactive tools like appropriate high-quality images and self-explanatory videos give that effect by communicating more towards the user with fewer efforts.

Easy Readables

The content across the website despite being good can fail to create an impact if it is not readable. This can happen due to a lot of factors including but not limited to background used, images used, font size and color. Overall color scheme and factors like appropriate use of space on the web page also play a critical role.