What Makes a Good Website?

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Ah, yes, the sixty-four thousand dollar question. What makes a good website? What makes a bad website? We all want to know what makes a website a good website. Well, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, of course, but there are some essentials. Here are the 7 essentials to a good website:

1. Purpose:
   This is the crux of what we talk about when we're up on our soapbox. You'll hear us use the word 'objectives' a lot. Why do you have a website? What its purpose? How are you going to measure your success?
    
2. Design:
   We're talking about things like colour choice, alignments, visual interest, and meaningful metaphors.
    
3. Message:
   Content is king. Every page in your website needs a goal. You need to understand who your target audience is and what you want them to do. Then you must provide them with the appropriate information and a meaningful call to action.
    
4. Architecture:
   How are your pages organized? Is it intuitive? Will your target audience understand? Think about Disney.com will differ from Microsoft.com.
    
5. Usability & Accessibility:
   HTML is still a coding language and it needs to be well formed and accessible. Not everyone who visits your site is perfectly enabled. Some people have disabilities, some have slow connections, some can't install the Flash plug-in. Knowing your target audience and your goals certainly helps to set your usability and accessibility standards.
    
6. Online Marketing:
   Appealing to the search engines is a game. Get it wrong and you'll find yourself banned. Do it right and you'll be rewarded with lots of free, targeted traffic. It's not difficult, it just takes experience and planning [view our Website Promotion services].
    
7. Technical Stuff:
   Is your domain easy to remember? Is your ISP reliable? Do they have 20,000 other websites hosted on your server? Do they support the right technologies for your website to grow?

Components of a Successful Website

The components of a successful website are more numerous than you may think. We have designed a diagram illustrating some of the important components of a great site.

Components of a Successful Website

As illustrated in this diagram and content above, a successful (i.e. good) website has many components above and beyond just image and content:

Case Studies:
What Makes a Good Website/What Makes a Bad Website

Want to see some real world examples of what makes a good website and what makes a bad website? We have taken the time to dissect a couple of sites that reflect both good and poor design, and we give plenty of explanations for our opinions.

If you'd like to find out how Apis builds websites, and the methods we employ to ensure that our clients' sites fit into the 'good' category, visit our How We Work page.