4 Pieces of a Great Website
Great websites are everywhere online. When I’m looking for information or browsing through websites, I know almost immediately which websites are great and which websites are not. For me, the first impression is everything. From that first look I get an idea of how easy the site will be to navigate and how easy it will be to find what I’m looking for. A website’s first impression is determined by a couple of the factors that we’ll talk about in this article. Today is all about the four pieces that make up all great websites. These pieces include all different elements including design, SEO, technical makeup, content, and more. We’ll talk about why these are important and how you can improve them on your website. Let’s go!
Simple User Interface… Make it easy to use and find information
The first piece of a great website is a simple, yet powerful User Interface. A website’s user interface (UI) is responsible for the navigation users take around the site combined with the design integrations (more on design in a bit). Ease of navigation is one of the first things I notice when I land on a site. Right away, you should be able to recognize how to move about the site and find the information or next steps that you’re looking for. If navigation is easy, users will be happy. If not, users won’t stick around or come back a second time.
How can I improve UI?
Think about UI in two parts: Navigation and Design Elements. When it comes to navigation, there should be a clear framework for how to navigate around the pages on the website. Users should be able to start from the home page and navigate through the pages in an organized fashion in order to find the information or call to action that will satisfy their reason for being on the site. If the organization is messy, then users won’t be able to find what they’re looking for and most likely leave the site to look elsewhere for what they need.
The second part of UI is incorporating design elements that make sense. If the design of your site affects how people interact with it or make the layout confusing, then that’s a problem. Like we’ll talk more about in the next section, design should make sense for your brand and assist in making the navigation of your site simple and sensical.
Design… tell your brand story to your audience
Design is the next piece of a great website. Design is where creators and businesses get to tell their story and showcase their brand. Visitors to your site should be able to get a feel for your brand with the first look, so creating that unique appearance is what sets your site apart from others.
While unique designs can tell a compelling story, it’s also important to make sure your design elements enhance your UI and don’t track from it. Like we talked about before, UI is a combination of navigation and design, so your design elements are responsible for much more than just looks. Here are some good things to consider when designing your site:
Visual appeal - Certain colors and fonts just go well together! Take a top-level look at your brand scheme and see how yours fits together and how you could creatively implement those elements into your site.
Navigation and CTAs that pop - Buttons and menus aren’t fun, but they can be. Sleek and carefully placed buttons and menus can be the difference between landing a lead or a bounced visitor. Make sure your navigation elements contrast and stand out on your site, making them easier to find.
Branding = Credibility - Your brand is your reputation and is how people recognize you. Make sure your site resembles your brand and you’ll build credibility, trust, and a more positive reputation with your audience.
Here are some things to watch out for and design elements to avoid:
Overlapping website elements - Make sure things are clear, spaced out, and well organized when working with your site layout. If elements are hidden, overlapped, or hard to access, people won’t get to where you want them to go.
Colors that don’t contrast - Color is crucial! If your website is boring or monochromatic, not only does it lack appeal, it can also be hard to read. White text on a black background? Sharp and easy to read. Green text on a blue background? Blurry and difficult to make out. Integrate your design elements, but be thoughtful with how you do it - always think from a visitor or customer perspective!
Unclear/messy branding - If your site doesn’t resonate with your branding, that’s a red flag. A website is a huge asset to a brand and a business, so it needs to look like it belongs! If you use colors, fonts, or other elements that don’t match with your branding in other place, visitors might get confused with where they’re at and what company the site is affiliated with. Always keep it simple and stick with elements that make sense for you to be on the safe side.
Content… Provide value to website Visitors
If I had to pick one piece that was most important, content is probably the one. At the end of the day, the content on your website is what visitors are looking for. Most people are coming to your site looking for answers. Answers to a question from the content on your site or answers to a problem they can get by filling out a form and working with you. Either way, the content and information you provide on your website is largely responsible for the success of your site and your business!
Content is how you can prove you’re a high-quality business with a high-quality website. By creating great content you provide value to your customers, which in turn has a ton of benefits for you. Providing value is how you build a large and satisfied customer base, which means a more successful business. Content that people utilize is also how you build brand and site authority. Brand authority is how customers view your business and site authority it critical when it comes to SEO (more on that later). If great content builds brand authority, then you should create lots of it. Here’s how.
Keys to great content:
Be clear & concise - Sure your website has lots of pages, but don’t stuff pages with lines and lines of content. Use lists, bullets, and tables to simplify formatting and group content into easy to absorb snippets.
Educate, don’t sell - Remember, your content is providing value and helping people answer questions and solve problems. Once you show your audience that you know what you’re talking about and can help them, then you can introduce them to your products or services. Maybe create a sales funnel later, after your content.
Write like a person - There’s a lot of fuss recently about keywords, SEO, and ranking on Google. It’s important to know that Google’s latest update is about helping people find good content, which means that trying to sound like a robot and keyword stuffing isn’t a good strategy anymore. Believe it or not, using your own voice and writing like a person is a great way to go. If you’re not a great writer you can practice a lot or hiring a professional content writer.
Grammar and formatting matters - Like anywhere else, grammar is important. It improves readability, builds brand authority, and Google likes good grammar (improves your SEO). So make sure there, their, and they’re are used correctly;)
SEO… crush it on Google and in organic search
The last piece of great websites is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is the process of getting your website and content seen on search engines results pages (like Google). SEO takes into consideration a lots of different factors including the navigation of your website, content quality, and technical factors (meta data, page titles, descriptions, and other scripts and tags). Great SEO is essentially the culmination of building a great website and then continually updating it and its content.
Depending on your industry, website construction, and website goals, SEO can be a big undertaking or something that’s relatively simple. If it’s a small SEO website, lots of website CMS’s have built in tools that you can use to work with SEO yourself. If it’s a large or complex website, hiring some more experienced in SEO might be a good idea.
Easy ways to improve SEO by yourself
Make sure all pages have a Title and a Description - Often done in the Page Settings of your CMS, these are the elements that show on search results pages. The Title should have a word or phrase unique to that page, your business name, and a location marker. The Description is a short paragraph that quickly describes that page in more detail.
Make all pages have only one H1 - Header tags are very helpful for when Google crawls (looks at your webpage) your web pages to check for information. The H1 tag is essentially the title for that page. Other paragraph headers can have other heading tags such as H2, H3, etc. Most website CMS have ways you can set header tags without going into your website’s code, making it easy for anyone to do.
Use Alt Text on images - Alt text is text that describes an image. Alt text is readable by Google so it knows what the images on your site are about and it also displays when images are unable to.
Update content regularly and remove outdated info - Keeping your website current is most important when it comes to SEO. Google wants to find users the best search results, so keeping currently info is usually a good idea. Remember to keep content organized, concise, and interesting too.
Now you know four of the most important pieces that make up a great website. Did you think back to your own website at all and think of areas that you could improve? Hopefully this gave you some good ideas that can improve the look and feel as well as the performance of your website. A good place to start is to make a list of the improvements you need to make, rank them in order of importance, and then tackle them one at a time. Digging into a website can be a daunting task, but if you’re organized, prepared, and follow some of the tips here you’ll be gaining more site traffic in no time;)
Need more help? Reach out to us! caleb@standoutmarketingmn.com