What really makes a great website?

These days it's quite easy to create a website. Site builders such as Squarespace or Wix allow you to create one in just a few clicks. But the question is, how easy is it to create a high-quality website that delivers results for your business? What makes a good website?

At Itag Media, we believe a good website is your best partner to achieve your business goals. When we say "good", we mean a high-quality, custom website joined to a good web strategy that's been designed to bring leads to your business, sales to your online store or support to your clients. Sometimes, a website may even just be to bring more visibility to your brand.

Some key elements to consider:

1. A great domain name (and hosting service).
   A great website has a great domain name. Most times this will be the name of your business followed by the best extension (Aussie websites are normally .com.au). We also recommend securing .com, .net, .net.au and .com.au for brand protection.
   
   
2. A simple navigation menu
   A quality website needs a simple menu. It's one of the most-used parts of a website, so if it's able to be understood at the first glace, your users are going to enjoy using your website a lot more. We recommend using the grunt test (we came up with this one ourselves) - learn more about it here.
   
   
3. Strong and powerful visual elements
   Your website should be a creative mix of unique, but brand-related imagery, illustrations or colours. You don't need a banner with a big stock photo that's darkened, with white text on top. That's what everyone, including your competitors, is probably doing. Get creative! We also recommend white-space; this is the empty area around elements of your website that allow these sections to 'breathe'.
   
   
4. Great copy & content
   Optimise the content on your website. This is important because while you may have great imagery and pretty designs if a user of your website doesn't feel confident when reading what you have on your website, you may lose out on a lead. Your website content needs to be targeted to your audience, clean and concise, professional, optimised for search engines and persuasive.
   
   
5. Encourage interaction
   Your website should lead a user to interact with the site. Clicking buttons, filling out forms and moving about the website is the way you'll take your user through the website journey to buying from you or getting in contact.
   
   
6. Branding
   Your customers (and potential customers) will begin making connections between your logo, your brand and your website from the very beginning. Ensuring a consistent brand experience between all aspects of your business is important to retaining a strong 'brand image'. When someone sees an advertisement on a billboard, then arrives at your website to see different colours, an old logo and content that seems inconsistent with the messages they've seen elsewhere, they may not feel confident to buy.

What now?

We have more tips on what makes a great website including intuitive design, accessibility and responsiveness in the entire article on our website. Read the post and download The Lead Generation Black Book now >>