What Makes A Good Website or a Bad Website?

What makes a good website a good website and what exactly is a bad website? Well, let's start with a few characteristics of a good website:

Purpose and Intent

What is the purpose and intent of your website? Make a plan for your site and clearly identify its purpose. Even if it is to keep family members updated on reunion plans. Whatever the intent, know what it is. A good, well-planned site will be obvious.

Site Stickiness

Give your visitors a reason to come back. Have you ever viewed a site and noticed article dates that are three years old? Or you viewed the site twice in 6 months and nothing has changed? Why would you want to visit it again? Ask yourself, "Why would anyone want to visit my site?" and "What do I provide?".

Your site must provide visitors a reason to return. You need good, regularly updated content. There are some good content ideas in the sidebar.

Your website designer can easily update your site with new articles and photos that you provide. Most designers offer Updating and Maintenance packages to assist you in keeping your site fresh and your visitors coming back!

Good Navigation & Organization

It is frustrating to users to enter a site and not be able to find what they are looking for or to end up on a page with no menu or back link.

The best way to avoid these problems is to sit down and plan the site structure before you begin. Make sure that users can clearly and easily find what they are looking for and that there are no "dead-ends". Regularly make sure that any links to other websites are still active. Test your site often.

Consider at least a site map and even a search feature that will aid users in finding what they need to find. A good website will have great navigation, a search feature, and a site map!

Loadability

Believe it or not, there are still many, many users that still use dial-up to access the internet. If your site is loaded with un-optimized photos, silly animations, cheesy backgrounds, music and the like, it will take forever for your page to load. And actually, your users will be gone before it is finished loading.

According to a recent study by Careleton University in Ottawa, Canada, 50 milliseconds--that is just one twentieth of a second--is all the time you have to make an impression! That being noted, it is critical that you rid your front page of unnecessary garbage that slows your load time.

Visual Appeal

Knowing that you only have one twentieth of a second to make an impression, visual appeal in a blink of an eye is critical. How do you accomplish this?

First, good color schemes. Without getting too much into accessibility concerns because that is beyond the scope of this particular article, at least consider that your site can be seen by viewers with less than perfect vision. Be sure that you can at least read your content! Did you ever see a site that you could barely read the text because of bad contrasting color choices or because there is text on top of busy patterned backgrounds? Yuck! Don't they want anyone to read what they bothered to put on the internet?

Lead with attention getting content. Put your best up front and lead users into the rest of the site. Minimize any advertising on the front page. Don't hide your search feature or navigation. It should be above the fold and the second thing they see after your logo.

Highlight areas of new content, category navigation and links to the most popular areas. Don't use large photos and animations, instead use color boxes, bullets, and small, attention getting icons.

Bad Websites

We have discussed some of the characteristics that a good website will have, but what really makes a "Bad Website"?

Poor Color Scheme . No consistent color themes and bad contrasting text. We've discussed this, briefly already, but your usage of colors and contrasting text can make or break your site visually.

Poor Image Usage. Unnecessarily large images that are distorted or just plain bad photos are just flat-out ugly and a huge no, no. If you don't know how to optimize your .jpg or .gif images for faster load time, find someone that does or don't use the photos! Consider using thumbnail images that link to the larger photo.

Long Pages. Scrolling down a long page of information can be frustrating to users. Even worse are long pages with no easy way to get back to the top of the page!

Irrelevant Animations, Banners, and Graphics. If these items aren't absolutely necessary--don't use them! They slow down load time and frankly just aren't cute anymore.

Here, we have just touched the surface on some of the characteristics of Good vs. Bad Websites. There is much more to talk about. We will discuss issues such as Search Engine Optimization techniques, Site Structure, Designing with CSS, Why using Frames & Tables are bad, How to Choose a Website Design Company, and more.