Essential Elements of An Awesome Website
At Connect4 Consulting we like to think that we specialize in creating Awesome Websites for our clients. But what’s awesome one day is not so awesome a few years later. This blog post lists the essential elements of an awesome website and unpacks each of the essential elements.
Your website is often the first interaction between you and your audience (customers, donors, readers, grantees, general public, etc.). It is essential that your website impresses your target audience. Building an impressive website requires either a significant investment of time and effort or a significant investment of money. Sometimes it requires all that and more.
You really shouldn’t settle for anything less than a totally impressive website. In fact, your website should be awesome right from the get-go. In this article, we’ll tell you the best things you can do to help you stand out from the competition. Here, then, are the essential elements of an awesome website:
It has to look good.
If you want to capture and maintain attention, your website must look good and it must look good to your target audience. Knowing your audience is critical because there are a wide variety of awesome websites, but not all are appropriate for the same audiences. So you need to think about the following elements of visual design:
- layout
- color palette
- fonts/typography
- images
- symmetry and balance
- white space
- supporting media/videos
It needs a clearly defined purpose.
Visitors should be able to determine what your site is about at a single glance. If your site is about cars, that should be obvious. If your site is about drones, I should be able to see that. If your site is about Chuck Norris, you shouldn’t need to explain. It should be perfectly clear what your site is about, without requiring any real thinking.
Yet you’ll see dozens of therapy and yoga websites with serene pictures of waterfalls or zen-like arrangements of pebbles. These may be beautiful and put people in a good mood, but it’s only a good approach if the purpose of the website is obvious. It is hard enough to get people to your website. Make sure that once they get there, they know what it is you want them to do.
It has to be easy to use.
An awesome website should be totally intuitive. That means someone visiting the website doesn’t have to think to figure out how to move around the site. The very best sites make people forget what they came to see – as long as they find what they were looking for in the first place.
User-friendly websites include:
- clear and coherent navigation
- links that give a good indication of what they lead to
- something that makes users want to explore further
- good accessibility features
- seamless responsiveness
A well designed website is like a well-designed chair. People should want to sit in it. The feeling should be that it’s almost impossible to resist being drawn in.
Put the most important things at the top of the page.
Always lead with whatever is most important. Don’t tuck those things away in the footer and make people have to hunt for them. When the visitor finds what they are looking for, make sure it works.
Make sure all users have an awesome experience.
The site should work on all devices. To do this your site needs to be responsive. It needs to have images that are optimized so they don’t use too much bandwidth to load.
