Your website isn’t that important. No, in fact your website is critical! Having a presence on the web is vital to success in today’s marketplace. As the face of your business, your website needs to make a fantastic first impression on a visitor and keep them interested in your site. There are a few critical elements a website needs for it to succeed. If you miss any of these elements, your website is not doing you nor your business justice. In fact, it may even be harming your reputation.
Critical Element 1: Design and Flow
That’s right, it has to look good! “Ok, hang on a second” you say, “what about sites like Wikipedia? It isn’t all that good looking.” Isn’t it? Sure it may not have all the fancy HTML5 elements that some other sites have, but it’s design is intentional. You see, it isn’t always about flash and colour, and Wikipedia knows that. It takes a great deal more time and effort to create a design that is simple yet powerful. It’s quite easy to make a design that is powerful, but is gaud awful.
The design of your site needs to be simple, and simple doesn’t mean plain or boring. Simple can still be very colourful, vibrant and exciting, but it should be simple and easy to understand easily. This leads to the second half of this critical element: flow. Your site should have a flow to it such that a visitor is naturally drawn from point to point, viewing all the elements you want them to see.
Lets look at Wikipedia a bit more since I’ve already mentioned it.
Simple design that flows
The main page for Wikipedia draws your eyes to the center globe. The globe itself represents the idea of the website itself – knowledge from around the world that is not complete (will it ever be?). Naturally, your eyes hit the globe first then you are drawn to “Wikipedia” at the top since it’s a bit more pronounced with a larger font size and bolder. Then, your eyes wrap around the globe (following the different languages) until almost falling on the search box. That search box is probably the main reason you’re visiting Wikipedia so it’s role in the design is very important.
Your overall design should be simple (not ‘busy’) and should allow the visitor’s eyes to naturally flow to the most important aspects of the page.
How about an example which doesn’t utilize good design or flow.
Poor design, no flow.
This website is… well it’s terribly designed and has no flow. It’s far too busy and your eyes struggle to find a specific location on which to land. Sure, you bounce from spot to spot, looking at the different things, but there’s no focus and definitely no flow. If your website looks like this, you need to hire a designer!
Critical Element #2: Navigation
Alright, you have a beautifully designed landing page (often called the ‘home page’) that flows wonderfully. Great! But how does your visitor get around your site? If your site has a great design and flows well, it doesn’t really matter if your navigation system is terrible. To be clear, the navigation system is the set of links or buttons that a visitor must click to get from one page to another within your website. There are two sub-points to this critical element.
- Be consistent: If you have a menu bar along the top of your landing page, make sure this menu bar is at the top of (nearly) all web pages across your site. The visitor needs to know, at all times, that the navigation is along the top of the page no matter where they are in your site.
- Be intuitive and simple: There’s that word again – simple. For your “About Us” page, don’t use a link titled “Information you may want to know about us”. That’s too long and not intuitive. Use the somewhat standard “About Us”. Everyone knows what that means and knows what type of information they will find there. The link title should, in a word or two, describe the area to which the user will be taken if they click that link.
Critical Element #3: Content
You’re cooking now – your website is beautiful, flows nicely and has a solid navigation system. Now you need content. But not just any content, you need good content. A website with low quality content is like a Ferrari with a VW Beetle engine – it looks good, but will perform poorly (oh, and I actually do like the Beetle!). Quality content comes in various shapes and forms depending on the website’s purpose. A website offering plumbing services should probably have less content than, say, a website devoted to theoretical mathematics. Whatever your content is, it needs to be three things:
- It needs to be ‘on topic’. This means it has to be directly related to the purpose of your website. If you are offering plumbing services, you don’t need to go off on a tangent about how you changed the oil in your service vehicle. Not only is that not conveying the message that you offer plumbing services, but you’ll quickly loose the interest of your visitors and they will leave.
- It needs to be efficient. Thinking back to my english teachers “If you can say the same thing with fewer words, do it”. Great advice to follow.
- It needs to be what your visitors are looking for. A bit hard to explain, perhaps, but what I mean is if, to use the plumber example again, your customers are looking for a plumber they probably are looking for a few specific facts. They probably want to know if you can repair a specific type of problem, how much you charge, and how to get in contact with you. Great! So, on the main page you might want to outline (very efficiently) the types of work you do, what the hourly rate is, and the best way to book an appointment.
Having a website to represent your business on the web is only half the battle. You need to ensure your website is designed well with a great flow, has an easy way for your visitors to move around the site, and provide great content. If your site isn’t meeting these standards, you will likely find visitors show up, then leave within the first thirty seconds. But, executing these elements well can lead to visitors staying on your site longer and, dare I say, enjoying their visit! This can only lead to good things!
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