You know the kind of website that makes you go ‘wow’? The kind that is so user friendly it seems like it must be custom designed especially for you? The kind of website that looks great and feels like home…

Websites like these are few and far between, but when you find one, its like winning the lotto!

At Website Success, we have thought long and hard about what gives us that warm fuzzy feeling from a website and it is crystal clear that there is so much more to good website design than just how the website looks. Here are a few of the things we consider essential and ensure we take into account when we help our clients with updating, designing or developing websites.

Contact information that is plain as day:

There is nothing worse than wanting to make an enquiry (or heaven forbid, trying to buy a product from a website) and then finding yourself looking high and low trying to find the contact details for the business. How frustrating!

If they have even the smallest bit of trouble finding your contact details, many visitors will give up and move onto one of your competitors’ websites straight away. So, the lesson is, whether your business prefers to be contacted by email, phone, social media or even by good old snail mail; make sure you prominently include your preferred contact method on your homepage. Also give this information prime placement on follow-on pages and on the contact page as well. Another thing to think about is that it never hurts to have a brief enquiry form directly on key pages of your website.

Also know that you will get better results if you talk to your clients where they want to talk to you, not only where you want to talk to them. This means you may have to become versed in social media. The modern reality is that that’s where your future clients are, and if you aren’t there too, they might overlook you!

Great Content:

The first step in writing great content is to think like your visitors – consider what they will be looking for and make it easy to find and simple to understand.

If you already have a website with analytics installed, one way to do this could be to consider the most viewed pages on your current website and think about how well they work and if there are ways to improve them. Whether you have an existing website or not, you will also want to think about which questions you often get asked by prospective new clients. Make it super easy to get the answers to these questions, but do not necessarily lump all the answers into a frequently asked questions section… these tend to be very messy and can often raise more questions than they answer.

Easy Navigation:

What is your business known for? Put it front and centre on the homepage and keep it easily accessible for people wherever they are on your website. Organise your content so it is all appropriately categorised and logical to find. Keep the main navigation straight forward and uncluttered.

Consider what the main services or products you offer are and segment visitors according to whatever it is that they seek right from the homepage. Different groups of visitors often require the same information, but may need it spoon fed to them in a different way. Think about what is important for different visitors at every stage of their visit to your website and cater to them specifically.

Impressive Look and Feel:

This includes high quality images, stylish colour schemes and good graphic design elements. Human beings are aesthetic creatures and therefore, modern looking websites tend to sway people’s opinion of how good the company is at providing their goods or services (whether it is an accurate assumption or not).

Many people like the look of Flash websites with lots of animation and graphics, but it is important to remember that Flash (though it can look really cool) has several downsides, including not being able to work on mobile devices (like phones or ipads). At Website Success, we tend to use friendlier technology like JQuery to ensure that the website looks great for human visitors but also is friendly to search engines.

Take a look at our work to see some examples of these ideas in practice. What do you think makes a website user-friendly? Feel free to leave a comment below.