Websites are the new shopping malls. They are the new neighborhoods. They are the virtual workplaces. They are the everything that runs our virtual world. Despite the mushrooming growth of mobile applications, websites still remain a primary way to create an online connection. Whether it is to find new customers or to render continuous services to existing ones, websites still remain relevant, if not more than ever.
Also Read: E-commerce Website, a Plus Point for Customer and Retailer
With so much importance riding on it, it is important to build a website that users would love interacting with. But, how does one build an effective website that users would love? What sets apart the champion websites from the others? Are there any specific characteristics that you can incorporate into your website to make it more user-friendly?
With so much importance riding on it, it is important to build a website that users would love interacting with. But, how does one build an effective website that users would love? What sets apart the champion websites from the others? Are there any specific characteristics that you can incorporate into your website to make it more user-friendly?
Turns out, there is a long list of such features that you can bank on. Some tried, tested and proven website designing principles that can turn your website into a magnet that attracts and keep users hooked to it.
From a bird’s eye view, there are two features that every website irrespective of the industry or purpose should have. They are Usability and Utility.
Usability – The website should be useful to the visitor and serve the purpose for which they landed on it
Utility – It should provide some utility to the visitor by means of setting the stage to perform an action, like consuming content, signing up for a service, requesting a demo, knowing the pricing, etc.
Every decision that you take in relation to building a website should revolve around these two factors.
Now let’s take a deep-dive into some of the characteristics of successful websites:
- They are intuitive:
Good websites do not make users think. They flow easily like a stream of water. The content, the grids, the CTAs, forms and everything is placed at the strategic locations to capture the user’s intent when it is at its height.
Also, they have the right elements in the right places that will provide the user with the information or serve their purpose.
- They can be measured:
What cannot be measured cannot be improved. The same applies to a website too. If you cannot measure how your website is performing in terms of traffic, user dwells time, scroll length, etc. you cannot refine your website for better performance.
There are plenty of tools that can help you with the task of measuring your website. Some of them include:
l Google Analytics
l CrazyEggg
l AttentionWizard
l ClickTale
- They have a persuasive copy:
If there is one thing which can grab your user’s eyeballs and their attention alike, it is a great copy. By great copy, I mean persuasive copy that can convince your customers of the prowess or goodness of whatever you are trying to sell or provide.
Persuasive copywriting is basically age-old copywriting but for the digital space. Unlike its predecessor, digital copies need to be enriched with SEO-friendliness. They need to be incorporated with the right keywords, meta tags and such elements that will make the website easy to find for users as well as easy-to-crawl for search engine bots.
- They take security seriously:
Although websites do a lot of monitoring of user activity for personalization, the best ones always stand apart in terms of security. They walk the extra mile to ensure that their user data, privacy and data integrity is protected at all times. You can secure your web app with an SSL certificate which will encrypt all information that passes to and from the website. In fact, using the right SSL certificate can also help in improving the website’s SEO ranking. So, when you are building your next website do not think twice to get GeoTrust SSL Certificate or similar SSL certificates that can improve your website’s ranking.
The need for website security has become intense after the recent introduction of GDPR and similar data security measures. The thumb rule is to ensure that every bit of data that your website collects is collected only for a specific purpose, such data is stored safely, and that the users know explicitly that such data is being collected.
- They serve a specific objective:
Every website is created for a specific purpose. Like movies that appeal to different sets of an audience, a website also has it’s own belonging to specific target audiences. Knowing who your target audience and developing your website around their needs should be the primary objective of every website.
Find out what purpose your website should serve. Should it sell? Or should it provide information? Or, is it created for the purpose of supplying information that your target audience would be curious to know. Good websites know what their purpose is and are designed around that.
- They have a simple design philosophy:
“Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”, said Leonardo Da Vinci once. The best of tools and websites boast of a simple design philosophy that is pleasing to the eye and also utilitarian in nature.
The use of white space, heuristics, hues and gradients, fonts, etc. all play a major role in making a website look simple yet sophisticated in nature. The idea is to make the website look great and also feel great when the user is visiting it for the first time and browsing around. With the help of heat maps and analytics, you can figure out what would be the best design that can make your users dwell longer on your website and interact more.
Final Thoughts:
As technology evolves on an everyday basis, there is a constant need to keep your websites also evolve with the same. The process that you followed five years ago to create a website is no longer feasible. There are new processes in place that puts the user as the centerpiece. When you build a website with the user in the centre, everything around it will fall in place by default. The points we have described above should help you do that with gusto.
