A great website has 5 key features:
1. Appearance
2. Content
3. Functionality
4. Website Usability
5. Search Engine Optimization
Appearance
A site must be visually appealing, polished and professional. Remember, it’s reflecting your company, your products and your services. Your website may be the first, and only, impression a potential customer receives of your company.
An attractive site is far more likely to generate a positive impression and keep visitors on your site once they arrive. As businesses large and small continue to populate the web, your challenge is to attract and keep users’ attention. Ideas like this are what PR professionals pay attention to keep their businesses successful.
Content
Along with style, your site must have substance. Remember that your audience is looking for information that will help them make a decision, so it should be informative and relevant. Use this opportunity to increase visitor confidence in your company’s knowledge and competence.
Functionality
Every component of your site should work quickly and correctly. Broken or poorly constructed components will only leave your visitors frustrated and disillusioned with your company. Across the spectrum, everything should work as expected, including hyperlinks, contact forms, site search, event registration, and so on.
Usability
A critical, but often overlooked component of a successful website is its degree of usability. Your site must be easy to read, navigate, and understand. Some key usability elements include:
• Simplicity: The best way to keep visitors glued to your site is through valuable content, good organization and attractive design. Keep your site simple and well organized.
• Fast-loading pages: A page should load in 20 seconds or less via dial-up; at more than that, you’ll lose more than half of your potential visitors.
• Minimal scroll: This is particularly important on the first page. Create links from the main page to read more about a particular topic. Even the Search Engines will reward you for this behavior.
• Consistent layout: Site layout is extremely important for usability. Use a consistent layout and repeat certain elements throughout the site.
• Prominent, logical navigation: Place your menu items at the top of your site, or above the fold on either side. Limit your menu items to 10 or fewer. Remember, your visitors are in a hurry — don’t make them hunt for information.
• Descriptive link text: Usability testing shows that long link text makes it much easier for visitors to find their way around a site. Long, descriptive link text is favored by Search Engines, too. Back links are important to give users a sense of direction and to keep them from feeling lost. Use a site map, and breadcrumbs, if necessary.
• Cross-platform/browser compatibility: Different browsers often have different rules for displaying content. At a minimum, you should test your site in the latest versions of Internet Explorer (currently, versions 8 and 9), as well as Firefox and Safari.
• Screen Resolution: Screen resolution for the typical computer monitor continues to increase. Today, the average web surfer uses a resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels. However, you need to make sure that what looks good at this setting will also work nicely for other resolutions.
Search Engine Optimized (SEO)
There are hundreds of rules and guidelines for effective search engine optimization, and this isn’t the place to cover them all. For starters, follow these simple rules:
• Include plenty of written content in HTML format. Don’t use Flash, JavaScript or image-only objects for your navigational items.
• Use your important keywords frequently and appropriately in your copy.
• Minimize the use of tables and use Cascading Style Sheets for layout and positioning; keep your HTML code clutter-free.
• Leverage your links — make them descriptive and use your keywords in the link text
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