The core understanding of what is a good website? Does it meet strategic intentions?
What is a good website?
A good website does not necessarily equate to a very fanciful website with all the latest dynamic elements (unless you are in the creative line). If you want to draw inspirations from great looking websites, do check out https://www.awwwards.com/
The most important thing about a website is to see if it has met the strategic objectives the owner intended it to have?
- Does the owner want more leads?
- Does the owner want it a portfolio reference for offline-online engagements?
- Does the owner want to attract a bigger pool of talents?
- Does the owner simply want to look good in front of stakeholders?
If the website has been meeting the strategic intention, even if it does not look good, it is still a good website.
At the end of the day, fanciful designs usually conjured and proposed by creative agencies are overkill and lack understanding of usability.
From our experience in implementing both successful and failed web design projects, we are sure the design is not the most important element. The most important element is the usefulness of the information and usability.
Why do you need a good website?
Have you ever thought, why do you need to invest in a good website? You may be surprised that it is not just about attracting sales leads.
Through personal experiences and feedback from our clients who are willing to pay professional web designers, to them a good website will help in:
- Stronger branding
- More positive perception
- Better valuation of company
- Attracting new online prospects & converting them to leads
- Attracting potential valuable partnerships with bigger companies
- Attracting good talents to join the company
- Converting visitors to the intended action
- Improving digital marketing & SEO
A good website is like a staff that never stops working
Unlike human workers, a good website functions 24/7 every day, serving information to your visitors, just like a digital marketing staff that never stops working.
With the current internet age, most of the population are accessing information through the Internet, judging your company by what they feel when they first saw your website.
You only have that few precious seconds to capture their attention before they are gone forever.
With this understanding, you will find that a good website definitely needs to be part of the foundation to build your business.
If you think you do not need a good website, you may want to rethink it again.
Sometimes it is not just about getting customers, it is about impression and communication to relevant stakeholders.
Factors to decide what is a good website
So what constitutes a good website in the current context now? A good set of guidelines to aid in our judgment will be:
- Impression / Branding – The website must make the visitors feel that the company is a well-established entity, worthy of their trust and time.
- Clarity – The website must be easy to use and navigate. Information published must be very clear to the visitors.
- Speed – Research had shown that a slow loading website will turn off visitors. A good website should load fast and serve the required information without too many redundant fanciful elements.
- Mobile Responsiveness – The website must respond accordingly to the device screen width for optimum readability
- Ease of Maintenance / Security – The website should be secure and easy to update without involving too many stakeholders in order for effective systematic upkeep.
- Find-ability – The website should be easily visible to the targeted audience through Search Engines or Social media.
- As a tool – A good website should feel like a trusty piece of tool, where you can use it with confidence to publish information, knowing that everything is built on a solid foundation with proper structure.
Build a long term relationship with your website
Building a good website is not something you can achieve overnight.
You need more re-iterate again and again once you obtain more new information and you will also get better and better in understanding your visitors.
It took us 3 years and 8 rounds of iteration to get our current website to set off information structure that we are finally happy with.
That is also why knowing how to update your websites or having a trusted person to update it is a key element to creating & establishing a successful website.