The elements that define a great website

Creating a website gives businesses an endless amount of design freedom, but also requires essential elements are incorporated into the final product.

Things such as clear navigation and mobile responsiveness are crucial to a website’s effectiveness. These will affect your customers’ experience and by extension, their perception of your brand.

In this article we’ll outline what these critical components are. If your goal is to create a website that paves the way for your business’s success, here’s some helpful pointers:

1. Excellent navigation

The navigation menus will serve as the backbone of your web design, providing the foundation that keeps your website together and connected. Without this, visitors to your site will not easily find what they need, discouraging them from browsing your content and likely leaving altogether.

2. Mobile responsiveness

Today’s website must be mobile-ready. About half of total Internet traffic occurs on people’s phones, so it’s of great importance. If your web design fails to meet this requirement, it will effectively fail to serve a significant portion of the market, preventing you from reaching further success.

3. Intuitiveness

Your website has to be easy for people to understand and simple for them to use. Internet users are generally not very patient when it comes to looking for the information they need, let alone figuring out how your website works. If your website’s design is confusing and overly complicated, you risk alienating all of your customers and driving them off.

4. Integration

There are countless software applications that make operating your website much more effective. Your chosen website design must be able to readily plug into these tools, allowing you to perform tasks on the fly and updating your content quickly and efficiently.—all things that allow you to make the most of your website’s ability to reach customers.

5. Optimized content

The Internet is a vast network of entities that are all vying for the attention of people. To have a fighting chance, your website has to be optimised to rank well in search engines. This means that your content is not only using the right targeting methods (ie. keywords) but also provides pertinent, well written information that customers are looking for.

6. Security

This requirement is particularly important for businesses that make online transactions but any website will benefit from having strong security. It provides credibility to your brand, giving customers more confidence to do business with you.

7. Effective Calls To Action (CTA)

Perhaps the most important requirement for a website is to have CTAs that actually draw business in. After all, one of the most important goals of any website is to convert visits to sales or enquiries. Without these, your website would simply be a one-way form of communication, which defeats the purpose of it entirely.

Conclusion

Apart from the seven elements listed above, there are arguably others that are also important for your particular business. The ones we have outlined however, represent the basic essentials that you want to include regardless of what kind of business you have.

Need help building a great website? We got you covered. We are a web design agency with offices in Hertfordshire and Milton Keynes and our website designers will be happy to help you out.