Building a great website is within the grasp of anyone who wants it. Staying focused and understanding your goals is key. In doing so, you will make the site easier to manage and more concise.
The requirements of a great website will vary depending on what it is supposed to do. Whatever the site is supposed to do, make sure it dose it well. It should also do it as simply as possible. Something basic but often overlooked that all exceptional websites have is a contact form rather than a mailto: link. Why? Well, to start not everyone uses POP mail with a local client. Not everyone will be browsing from their own computer. On the positive side, having an easy to use contact form indicates a desire to communicate with your visitors.
How a website is organized, the nature of the site's navigation, and how visitors will interact with the website are all part of something called Information Architecture or IA. This is one of the more crucial parts of a website's design. If your visitors can't find what they need, then they will simply leave and never come back. Great sites understand the visitor and organize their content in such a way as to make it as intuitive for the visitor as possible.
The colours and style of your website will have a lot to do with who the site is intended for. These things tend to be more emotional than logical, but are still very important. You need to make sure your visitor can identify with the aesthetics of the site. They must be comfortable and have a positive reaction to the colors and layout of your site. So, while this will vary from individual to individual, just make sure you keep your audience in mind when designing the graphic components of the website.
I like Flash and video, and use them often. However, if they adversely effective the load time of your main pages then something is wrong. Excellent websites should have excellent load times. There is nothing wrong with using Flash animation, just make sure it loads in the background and doesn't keep the visitor waiting. This is a basic concept taught in beginning website design classes around the world, but more often than naught the temptation to put that cool video on the home page is just too great. Don't do it. Don't lose your visitor before they even get to see your website. Keep your load times down.
That content is king is a clich, but it still holds true. If you have unbelievably hot unique content, then your website is going to be unbelievably hot and popular. It should be valid, relevant, and easy to access. Exceptional content is at the heart of every exceptional website.
How current and up-to-date a site's information is can make or break it. Exemplary websites will always be 100% current and be used as an almost real-time communication tool to interact with their visitor base. Stale content, even if it was all the rage last month, often times just won't cut it for today's best websites.
Ensuring a visitors security while they are just visiting or making an online purchase is of the utmost importance. Exceptional sites go the extra mile to assess the risks that their visitors might encounter while visiting and do everything they can to both disclose and mitigate those risks.
About the author: Dustin Dickens is a
professional website designer located on the Costa Del Sol in Spain. Get Dustin's free report on how to be certain your
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