Websites are important digital assets many businesses rely on to attract new customers and maintain relationships with existing ones. Currently, there are more than 1.3 billion websites in the world. Even if we factor in that three-quarter of them are inactive, that’s still a large number. Businesses that want to differentiate themselves from the pack can use some great website designs to make sure their website stands out. But design alone will not make a website great.
Due to the critical role they play in the world of business, websites have been subjects of extensive research. We can say with certainty that some things make websites better, while others make them worse. Of course, not every website is the same or has the same purpose. But overall, any good website, or any website that performs well, needs to have the following characteristics.
Good Visual Design
The majority of information our brain gets about the outside world is visual information. Human brains are hardwired to process visual information swiftly. Vision is our number one sense, and it plays an important part in the opinions we form about objects, people, and — websites.
Great website designs rely on certain principles to boost website performance. Color theory is one of them, as is creating visual hierarchies. A great business website, for example, will be an extension of the business’ overall visual identity. The design of certain elements in a website has to be specific to maximize their functionality.
Call-to-action buttons are a great example. Visual design is under significant influence of trends. Websites that don’t update their appearance at least once in a while end up looking out of date. Out of date websites rarely seem trustworthy to their visitors.
Loading Speed
One of the major influences on the performance of a website is the speed at which its pages to load. The average loading times for websites is slightly more than 8.5 seconds. The recommended website loading speeds for 2018 should be under 3 seconds.
The longer it takes for a page to load, the more likely is that the visitors will go away from the website. When looking at mobile pages, more than a half of visitors will leave if the website takes longer than 3 seconds to load. Many different factors affect website loading speeds. Good hosting, great website designs, lightweight elements, the structure and size of databases are only some of the things that can boost the loading speeds of a website.
Navigation
When people visit a website, they should do something more than just look at the page they landed on. They should interact with the website by filling out a form, clicking on a link, or simply by browsing it. The rules of great website designs state that, in most cases, the content of a website should be split across several pages. To reach all of the information on a website, the visitors need to quickly understand how to navigate it.
When website navigation isn’t clear or logical, visitors will leave the website. Whatever it was they were looking for, they can find on other websites. Websites that understand how to enable users to navigate them have an enormous advantage over websites that don’t.
Poor navigation is one of the main reasons websites experience high bounce rates, as well as high abandon rates. Having an intuitive menu with a clear structure is the starting point of enabling effective navigation. Adding a search function is another.
Mobile-Friendliness
One of the ways people stumble upon websites is by finding them in search results. This kind of traffic is called organic traffic. It’s of extreme importance to many websites, which can spend thousands of dollars just to make sure they appear on the first page of search results.
The majority of searches, around 60% of them, are performed on mobile devices. Desktop users still use the Internet and search for things as well. But, statistically speaking, it’s more likely that a visitor to a website will be viewing it on a mobile device than on a desktop device.
For websites that offer a good user experience only on desktop devices, this means trouble. Desktop-first websites don’t display well on smaller screens. They are hard to read, hard to navigate, and too frustrating to use. For the best websites, this is not a problem. They were built in a mobile-friendly manner, ensuring good user experience regardless of the device used to access them.
Effective and Appropriate Elements
It’s hard to speak about the traits of a good website because websites can do a lot of different things. A website that’s made primarily to get users to sign up for a newsletter, for example, will feature one type of elements. A company presentation will feature a different set of elements. The design of the websites will be different as well.
When creating a great website, the choice of elements plays an important role. Every element on a website needs to support the purpose of the website. Any element that doesn’t support it shouldn’t have a place on the website. There’s no reason to include a call-to-action if there’s no action a user should perform. There’s no reason to include a form if the website wasn’t designed to get people to sign up for something.
A great website will very carefully use the elements it needs. The number of fields in a form, for example, can influence the likelihood of visitors filling it out. The placement of a call-to-action can influence how often people click on it. The point isn’t only about having the elements websites need. The best websites will also make sure that those elements are as effective and efficient as possible.
In the digital world, a website is one of the most important assets any business can have. Businesses that recognize this invest large amounts of money into creating great websites. But even the businesses that can’t afford big investments need to step up their digital game. Picking one of the great website designs is something they can do. They can also ensure that they include these traits every great website has to possess.
