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Your website is often the first touchpoint for your potential clients or customers. In fact, 91% of shoppers will look for your website first, before even considering your products or services. As the saying goes, you never get a second chance to make a first impression. Hence, ensuring your website exudes quality on every front is paramount. But what defines a ‘high-quality website’? From the technical development of your site, to the content that your users interact with, there are 4 elements that are essential, which we dive into below.
1. Exceptional User Experience (UX)
When a user steps into the realm of your website, they embark on a journey. It’s a voyage they anticipate will be smooth, like a stroll through a meticulously planned garden, where paths guide them effortlessly to their desired destination. At the heart of this journey is the user experience, serving as the very foundation of their adventure.
Before the website is developed, and even before you start playing around with styling, you need to plan your ideal user experience, keeping in mind that users want to reach their destination quickly and smoothly. Specifically, navigation, responsiveness and interactive elements are crucial.
Imagine the ‘Navigation’ as the well-marked pathways in this garden. They need a clear roadmap — one where menus intuitively direct them, calls-to-action stand out like guiding stars, and the layout forms a coherent and logical sequence.
Next, consider ‘Responsiveness’ as the terrain of the garden. Whether visitors are exploring through the compact lens of a smartphone, the broader vista of a tablet, or the expansive view of a desktop, they should find the landscape fitting perfectly to their perspective.
Lastly, the ‘Interactive Elements’ are the unique attractions of this garden — the fountains, benches, or interactive displays. Each clickable button or feature should work seamlessly, fulfilling user expectations and making their journey memorable.
In Summary
Navigation: Clear roadmap with intuitive menus, conspicuous CTAs, and logical page hierarchy.
Responsiveness: Optimal display across devices — smartphone, tablet, or desktop.
Interactive Elements: Flawless operation of every clickable feature for a complete user experience.
2. Stellar Content Quality
Your website’s content isn’t just about filling space; it’s about fulfilling needs. High quality content serves several critical functions and can have a direct influence on user experience, engagement and conversion. If your content is understandable, follows a logical flow and is relevant to your target audience, they will be more inclined to engage with your site, your service and your products.
How do users find your content? The first step is Search, most often Google Search. Google matches your website content with the search terms that your potential customers use, and offers up the most relevant website results first. Therefore, to help users find your site, you need to make sure your website content is SEO-optimised. If this seems like a daunting task, SEO writers are skilled at doing exactly that. They will sit with you, your content and your intention for the site, and either generate your website copy from a brief, or they can optimise the content you already have for the audience you’re looking to attract.
Great website content establishes authority and trust with your users as well as with Google’s Search Engine algorithm. However, website content, just like website development, isn’t simply a “set it and forget it” kind of exercise. User search keeps changing and evolving, and so should your website content. That doesn’t mean you need to overhaul your site every couple of months, but you can go over your website copy every page by page over the course of a couple of months, to check that all information is still relevant, or expressed in ways your users will find useful and descriptive.
In Summary
User Experience: Clear, understandable, relevant content.
SEO-optimised: Optimising for keywords and phrases your audience uses serves to connect them with your site.
Regular reviews: Review content periodically to ensure it’s still relevant, and serves your user’s needs.
3. Impeccable Design and Aesthetics
Aesthetic appeal goes beyond just “looking good”. It’s about ensuring every visual element communicates effectively and doesn’t create visual noise that will disrupt your user’s journey. Before your website is designed, make sure you and the designer have a clear styling guide in mind. A styling guide is like the CI manual for your digital presence, and serves as the single source of truth when it comes to everything visual on your site. From button and image styles, to fonts and your favicon, having a styling guide means you have a clear visual identity.
The design of your site is not supposed to attract all users, and it shouldn’t seek to resonate with everyone. Your site’s look and feel should align with your users’ expectations of your brand and how you engage with them.
How does your website draw in your target customers, and conversely, what might be pushing them away? When you’ve had the same website design for some time, it’s easy to overlook elements that could be off-putting to your visitors. Consider getting a UX/UI designer to audit your site, to identify usability bottlenecks and ensure that every interaction aligns with your brand’s goals and your audience’s expectations.
In Summary
Brand Identity: Your digital presence should resonate with your customers, and what they expect from your brand, echoing your identity, values, and promise.
Consistency: Uniformity in fonts, colors, and layouts is non-negotiable. It ensures users don’t feel they’ve landed on a different planet when they switch pages.
4. Architecture Excellence and Clean Code
The User Experience is well thought out and intentional, your content is optimised and speaks to your users, and the design brings colour and style to your brand voice. Now the only thing that’s left is the website build. Just like a well-built house, your website needs to be built on a good foundation. This means that the tech stack fits your needs, security and authorisation best practices are followed and the code is built in a clean, optimised way.
Clean, optimised coding means that the code base itself is organised, structured and follows consistent implementation practices. Principles like DRY (“don’t repeat yourself”) and KISS (“keep it simple, stupid”) ensure a code base that is easy to understand, maintain and scale. In addition, this ensures that website performance isn’t weighed down by unnecessary processing.
Google’s algorithm is all about serving great user experience to users, and a site that loads faster or has better overall technical performance delivers on this metric. That’s right, Google is evaluating the technical optimisation and performance of your site and taking that into account when showing website results, so building clean, maintainable code gets you closer to your users.
As with content creation, your code base needs to be updated, reviewed and optimised on a regular basis. Google’s algorithm changes and evolves continuously and the software, tools and libraries in use on your website or app get frequent updates. We recommend a monthly website audit on technical performance, to make the tweaks and optimisation updates along the way, ensuring that you never find yourself left behind.
In Summary
Clean Code: Organised, structured code ensures a maintainable, scalable and well-performing site.
Security: Building according to best practices keeps threats at bay, ensuring a safe browsing experience.
Regular audits: Ensure the performance and integrity of your code by doing periodic inspections of your site’s performance.
Conclusion
Your website is not just a virtual space; it’s a pivotal representation of your brand, a touchpoint for potential clients, and a driving force for your business in the digital realm. A high-quality website harmoniously combines exceptional user experience, compelling content, captivating design, and impeccable back-end architecture.
Regularly auditing and updating your site ensures it remains aligned with both user needs and technological advancements. Investing in these key criteria not only elevates your brand’s digital presence but also fosters trust, engagement, and loyalty among your audience. Remember, in the vast digital landscape, your website is your handshake, your greeting, and your promise – make sure it speaks volumes about your commitment to excellence.
