Websites have become an important and integral part of today’s business community. Before you get your website developed, take a few moments to understand what makes a website attractive and unique and optimally presents your business to the online community. After all, the primary objective of a website is to attract customers. How will you develop that understanding? You can develop it when you think like a user. As a user, what is it that attracts you the most in a website and why do you visit a particular website? When you see it from a user’s perspective, you know it better what makes people stay longer on some websites and what makes them immediately leave others.

Good websites have become a rarity. Among the millions available on the Internet, only a few attract the attention of its users. What is it that makes them attractive? A common belief is that if your website has lots of nice pictures and catchy animations, it will be considered good and will attract people and business. But is that really so?

So what makes a good website? How can you position your expectations from your website developer to deliver you a website that works for you? Here are some key features that your website must possess to make it effective.

Designed For Your Target Audience

Ask yourself the following questions: Does your website give the users what they are looking for? Does it carry enough content and appeal to bring them back to your website?

Design your website and structure the content with your target audience in mind. Give them a feel of your industry as you would when they visit your brick and mortar setup. Short of that, it is meaningless to put it on Web. For example, if you are in the hotel business, your website should be attractive and should have hospitality feel to it. Just having a few simple informative web pages about your hotel will not be sticky enough for the potential customers, and it will affect your business adversely.

Original, Up-to-date, and Valuable Content

Content is key. No matter how attractive and presentable your website is, it will remain worthless unless it is supported by relevant content. The content should be original and directly linked to your product(s) and business and meet the expectations of your users. Moreover, to make the content valuable to your customers, you should consider making frequent value-added updates to the website content. This helps to get repeat visitors to your website. Have you come across websites that have rampant spelling errors or are badly written? How long have you spent browsing such websites? Remember content is key and if the browsing experience is not good, it is unlikely to retain user attention.

Organised

Relevant content presented in a simple, organized and structured manner tends to be more effective. Simple things like vertical scroll on most pages, inconsistent use of font size, colour and style break the natural reading flow and irritate users and they are likely to navigate away from your website. Such irritants are simple design issues that should be taken care of to keep the user experience pleasant. If the user can locate any information that they need in a few clicks leading directly to that content, you have a winner.

Browser Compatible

Before launching your website, check whether or not your website displays properly in the popular browsers. Sometimes a website displays well on one browser and does not display on others. Some of the most popular browsers are Internet Explorer, Firefox, AOL browser and Opera.

You do not know the browser that a user is using, so ensure that your website is compatible with most of the browsers to avoid any viewing difficulties for the user.

Use of Colours

Colours may either attract or distract a user. In other words, it may have either a soothing or a distressing effect on the user's mind. Use colours that are agreeable to the eye. Some colours are very bright and may make the user not interested in reading the content at all. So take extreme care when making the choice of colours to be used on your web pages. The combination of background and text colours should be such that the text is easily visible.

Easily Navigable

Nothing frustrates a user more than a web page that does not have directions for further navigation or a way to access more information from the website without using the browser navigation buttons. Every web page should have a link to go back to the home page. For easy navigation, use the same layout and appearance for pages that are grouped together. Similar navigational items on different pages should appear in the same location on each page.

No Unnecessary Graphics

Proper use of graphics adds a positive dimension to your website, but if used unnecessarily, it creates confusion. A page with lots of graphics comparatively takes more time to load than the one with lesser graphics. Therefore, the practice should be to use them sensibly – to achieve impact without creating additional load on the page.

No Horizontal Scrolling

Users do not like horizontal scrolling. Scrolling from left to right to read information is annoying.

Doing so disrupts the natural flow of reading. Avoid horizontal scrolling completely.

Changing the Colour of Visited Links

When a user visits a link and again comes back to the same page, the colour of the visited link should be changed to another colour. This should be applicable for every link the user visits. The benefit of this approach is that the user knows the visited links and there is no ambiguity in deciding which links to visit next.

No Dead Links

All links in a webpage should take a user to the intended page. Often, it is seen that some links do not work – a link does not take the user to a valid page and the browser displays a “Page Not Found” message. They are known as dead links. Though this may appear to be a small problem, it erodes the confidence of your users in the completeness of your website and you will most likely lose user interest in your website.

Searchable

There are millions of websites available on the Internet. In that crowded place, how will you make your presence felt? Having a well designed website is just one part of the game. The next most important step is to make your website searchable and make it known to the world. You cannot expect your business to spread unless your website is easily available to the prospective customers. Using search engine optimization techniques is a way to spread your wings over the Internet.

Proper Use of Media Files

Though adding media files to your website can be helpful to your customers, avoid excessive use of them unless you are in the media business. If there is no way except to put audio and video files on your website, carefully choose the ones that are really necessary and use proper size optimization techniques to present them on the website. Also, instead of playing them automatically, give the user the option to play them.

Proper Use of Flash Files

Today Flash movies are widely used by websites to present ideas, products, offers, and services. Flash should be used to provide users with those features of a product or service that cannot be easily communicated in simple text and pictures. Indiscriminate use of Flash movies slows down the browsing experience of the users if they are working on dial-up connections. From the business perspective, the main purpose of a website is to promote any product or service. If slow speed hinders a user to get information about the product or service, the website will not meet its purpose. Therefore, use of Flash files at the cost of speed is not appreciable.

Form Enabled

A user is impressed with your products and services and wants to contact you. Do you have a form that the user can fill and send to you online? Users prefer to send their queries through online forms. Unless you offer a product or service that the users have been eagerly waiting for, they would not take the added trouble of searching for your company’s e-mail address and then sending across their queries. So prominently position all feedback and inquiry forms on your website.

However, never ask for any unnecessary information from a user as it may affect the user’s decision to fill the form at all. Also, make only those fields mandatory that are really meant to be.

Tracking Features

Tracking the activities of users on your website can be highly effective for your marketing plans. By using some tracking tools, you can get to know the interest of users— what service or product they are interested in. It can be known by tracking the pages they visit often and the duration of their stay on every page.

W3C Compliance

Making a website World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) compliant means following the specifications and guidelines for markup languages, such as HTML, XML, and XSL, while developing the website. The main aim of making a website W3C compliant is to reduce the overall cost of website development and maintenance. At the same time, the objective is to ensure that the website functions properly on the present browsers and devices as well as on the future browsers and devices and has build in capabilities to be available to people with disabilities.

Conclusion

For a website to be considered good, it is imperative that it fulfils its main purpose. The idea of a website is to promote your business. Whatever you want to include in your website should have direct relation to your business and the customers’ requirements. Unnecessary information and basic design flaws may prevent the user from effectively using your website. Therefore, your every effort should be channelled to make it as customer oriented as it can be.

Developing a website is like making an investment— positive results come soon if it appeals to the targeted audience. Within a short time, you may witness a spate of visitors visiting your website and thus creating more business opportunities for you. But it happens only when it fulfils the criteria of a good website.

Good websites promote your business and bad websites spoil your business. Where do you want to put your effort— in spoiling your business or promoting it?