6 Qualities of a good website: 

In my blog on the 9 reasons why your business need a website, it was stated that visitors mainly visit a website because of its content and this is why people say that content is king.

Every website has a content of some sort and good website content is not just about text, colours, pictures, audios and videos.

Many websites have contents that are outdated, unfriendly and visually uninspiring.

There are features of a good website that makes them to be functional to its purpose, attract high traffic, engage visitors, attract leads and produce conversion of customers.

We call these features qualities of a good website (or the key elements of a good website).

These are the characteristics that can make or break the effectiveness of your investment in the website. Presented below are 6 qualities of a good website.

1. Original, fresh and good Content

Content is the most important part of a website. It is very important to have original, accurate and credible content on the website.

The main reason for anyone visiting your website is content.

Content is King, they say. 

Good content are fresh, relevant,

written clearly, spell checked correctly and well-communicated.

Content that are updated regularly and engaging are fresh and usable and have the ability to attract more leads that can be converted to customers.

Keeping the content fresh through blogging and social media updates with good helpful links will keep visitors coming back.

This is also good for Search engine optimization indexing, direct search and will cause visitors to bookmark the site for easy reference.

When developing the content, there is the need to always keep the purpose of the website and the target audience in mind. It should be clear, easy to read and understand because people do not like to read from computer screens.

Although content is the most important aspect of a website but having only content presented with wrong colours and without relevant images and graphics can make it appear boring to the visitor/reader.

Thus, there is the need to present the text with background colors and images and pictures in a manner that they can be seen.

It is necessary to use color scheme that compliments and are pleasing to the eyes and all these will make the content to be appealing to the visitors. Multimedia content are good for entertaining and enlightening visitors.

They can be used to make the site interactive content, which will add to the site’s “interest quotient” and keep  visitors around longer.  However, they can slow down the website. Finally, the website should be designed to fit the screen resolution.

2. Simple and Professional Design

There is the need to design a website to be simple, visually appealing, polished and professional in order for it to be attractive. Even though visitors visit your website mainly because of the content, a beautiful and attractive website is more likely to generate positive impression and keep visitors once they arrive.

Remember,

the website is reflecting your company, your products and your services.

Your website may be the first, and only,

impression a potential customer may receive of your company.

As websites continue to populate the internet, the owner’s challenge is to attract and keep visitors’ attention.

Extra creativity may be required in choosing a perfect domain name to reflect the identity of the owner. The logo, banners and adverts should be presented in a clearly.

3. Appearance

A well designed website must have a good appearance (look and feel) and must be designed to meet its purpose.

It should reflect the organizational colours, presented in a well contrasted manner. Its text should not be too thin that it will require a magnifying glass to read it.

As a matter of fact, the text should not be oppressive. It should have a good layout to showcase the content and make it easy to navigate.

Breaking the text into headings, subheadings and using bullet points to present them can improve the payout of the pages and make the text more scalable.

The pages of the website should be responsive and be viewed easily on all screens sizes without having to scroll horizontally (left to right).

The idea of a page should be clear and straight to the point.

Visitors should be able to understand the purpose of the website when they visit with good graphics and aesthetics.

Good aesthetics should reflect on the personality of the entity. Using quality photography to increase visual appeal is good but it can slow down the loading of the page.

The pages of a good website must be appealing to the visitors.

4. User Friendly Navigation

In a user friendly navigation website, it is easy to find relevant content. If the site has a lot of content, a search box and a tag map can assist visitors to quickly find whatever they are looking for.

The logically related content should be grouped together in a well-organized manner using menus and the name of the menu item should be easy for the visitor to understand.

The menu items should not be more than nine (9). The menu should be placed at a point where the visitor can see it quickly, preferably at the top of the site.

The layout of the pages should be consistent across all pages and links should be used to display information in a very attractive manner.

It is important to have minimal scrolling of pages especially on the Home page.

There should be links from the Home page to read more about a particular topic.

Critical information, like “About Us”, “who you are”, “Testimonies”/”Comments”, “Contact Us” and “how you can be found”, should be easily accessible.

5. Speed

The pages of a good website should load quickly.

Graphics and audio materials should be used sparingly because they increase the download time to a web page.

Other factors that affect the speed of downloading a webpage are the speed of the server, volume of traffic on the website and the configuration of the computer that the visitor is using.

6. Security

The information in a good website should be secured from being hacked. Client’s information should be secured.

There are many security strategies that can be implemented in a website. There is the need to have a strong password, secure your error log, plugin protection, IP address blockages and so on.

There may be many other factors that can be considered to assess the quality of a good website such as domain name, tracking, Search engine optimization (SEO), and browser compatibility and so on.

Presented above are the 6 major qualities of a good website and it is believe that any good website must have these qualities.

Thank you

Augustus Zekaryah

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Other articles published by the author in this series at https://firstplus-ibs.com.ng that may be of interest are

1. Consulting
2. 8 things a consultant can do for you
3. Benefits of e-learning
4. 9 reasons why your business needs a website
5. How ICT can solve Nigeria’s socio-economic challenges

As you read them drop a comment because your feedback is very important to us. It will help us to improve. Regards…

About the author

Augustus is a management, banking and business computing professional with over 20 years of documented success in the field. Augustus is recognized for the application of software to solving business problems, Software Project Management, Enterprise Architecture Strategy, and Delivery of learning solutions with focus on adaptability, Development and execution of business plans, General management and administration, Operations management and  Best practice development. Augustus founded and manages FirstPlus Integrated Business Solutions (https://firstplus-ibs.com.ng) as a Software and Business Consulting outfit that specializes in Software development and integration, E-Learning development, Business and Marketing Planning, Consulting and training.Augustus brings to his work a high level of energy, passion, commitment and humour. He is married with children.