What makes a great website?
Your website should be consistent with your brand
Before you begin work on a website, it’s important that you understand your business at a deep level. Ideally, you should move through some type of brand strategy so that you can figure out key details like:
Why does your business exist and why should anyone care?
If you think of your brand like a person, what personality does it have?
Who is your target audience, and what are their needs?
These key details are necessary to inform the design of the identity elements that help identify your business to your audience. Examples of these elements are your logo, typography, color palettes, etc.
When it’s time to design your website you’ll already have a logo designed, fonts picked out, color palettes defined, and other guidelines in place. This makes the web design process much more seamless, it also ensures your website resembles your brand and is consistent with your other brand touchpoints.
Your website should help your business or organization achieve its objectives
Your objectives will be defined by the type of business you’re in. You might be a restaurant that wants to encourage users to order online. To increase the likelihood that people order online it might make sense to place the option to order online in numerous places throughout the site, i.e. in the banner area of the home page, after blog posts, on its own dedicated page, etc.
You might also be an e-commerce brand that sells their products online. You want people to visit your website to shop, so you should make it as frictionless as possible for them to do that. You might notice that popular e-commerce websites such as Apple, Amazon, and Kroger, as well as smaller (yet successful) niche brands like NOBULL and Gymshark all optimize their websites to make it simple for users to purchase their products.
Remove the obstacles that make it harder for your users to accomplish the objectives you want them to accomplish.
A website should be made in a way that considers the behavior and needs of your users
Here are some scenarios:
The pain point:
You’re a restaurant and you’ve heard your target audience complain about how many clicks it takes to get what they want while they’re on competitor’s website. In this case they’re trying to order food.
The solution:
You solve your users' problem immediately and make it simple for them to order online.
Take a look at how we handled this for one of our clients, Blacksmith Grill.
I understood that the majority of users who visit their website are there for 1 reason, to order food. So we removed the fluff and presented the option they're looking for immediately with the Order Online button in the banner area, and the Order Online button in the navigation area. Then I optimized the website to provide secondary options for users who need to see the menu, or learn about events.
Conclusion
Why should you care about the needs of your users? Because giving users what they want will drastically increase the conversion rate of your website, and keep people coming back for more.
