The 6 Qualities of a Great Website – Does Your Site Have them All? Part 1 of 2

09 Sep The 6 Qualities of a Great Website – Does Your Site Have them All? Part 1 of 2

There are a lot of individuals and firms that promote themselves as “great” website creators.  But why is a website labelled “great”?  Because it looks good?   Because it’s easy to use?  Yes, but there’s more.  If you truly want a great website, you have to find the right a team of specialists who can lend different perspectives and marry several different qualities together to work in harmony.

How many qualities?  That’s debatable, but from my experience, I say 6 necessary ones.

So here I outline the 6 items that your website should never be lacking in order of least important to most, the order of which may surprise you.  When screening your website creator, you should review each of these 6 points with them to ensure they have the required expertise and capability to implement all of these qualities, otherwise you may have to choose someone different creator or add the missing specialist to the mix.

(6)  Aesthetics / Graphical Appeal

Many people will be turned off if they arrive at your website only to find that it doesn’t look like a modern artist painted the screen in front of them.  These are the potential customers who are going to lose interest in your company pretty quickly if you don’t ensure your website creators can produce an aesthetically pleasing design.  Graphical appeal keeps people happy and interested, and it can keep your brand credible.  Therefore, I recommend to always stress the importance of a clean, modern site with appropriate graphics that impress the visitor.

Keep in mind however that how good your website looks is relative to your brand positioning and industry. For example, it is not as important for a website selling plumbing services to be as pretty as a high-end luxury car service website.

“So having a website that looks good only is 6th on the list?  What else is there?”  I know some people are asking this question right now, but stay with me.  People often think that having the most pretty website on the internet is the most important thing, but it certainly isn’t.

(5)  Brand Exposure

Too many small businesses care only about marketing initiatives that directly lead to a tracked sale.  While the majority of your marketing budget should be invested in this, marketing activities with the goal of showcasing your brand need focus too.  It is extremely important to give some effort to start building a proper, professional brand early in your business’ life, and your website is a great channel to start with.

Your “Brand” isn’t just your logo.  It’s almost everything visual or memorable about how you want your company defined.   This includes your colours, fonts, design styles, mottoes, content tone, and content personality.  You should be showcasing these items consistently across any media you use.  This shows professionalism and makes your business memorable so that if your website viewers see your business advertised somewhere else, they may be more intrigued to look into your company further.

Be sure to provide your website creators all the fonts, colours, styles and tones of your existing company ads, or provide them examples of completed ads/media pieces that you have used in the past so that they can implement your brand consistently on your website.

(4)  Optimized for Search Engines

If your website can’t be found on search engines, then you likely are going to have a problem getting your website traffic as high as you want it.  These days, the majority of effort to get a website ranked high on search engines is done through article writing and tactics off of the website itself, which are normally not within the scope of a website creator’s responsibility.  However, there are still tasks that your website creators do to help the website appear on Google and Bing when people search for companies like yours.  These are mostly technical things like building the website with proper markup code, adding title tags and meta tags, and other “techy” stuff.

It can be hard to verify if your website creator has implemented proper techniques in this area due to its technical nature.  For this reason, consider adding a mandatory SEO report into your website agreement that must be provided to you upon website completion that outlines all SEO tactics used.  Having this report will make it easy for a third party with technical knowledge to verify if the techniques used are valid and correct should you suspect otherwise.

So far we’ve gone through the bottom 3 qualities your website should never lack.  See the next article for the top 3  >