How To Make A Good Website
- 23 April, 2025
- 1:48 pm
This blog post aims to raise awareness of the challenges that website professionals face, and various concepts that can be applied to make websites more effective.
Table Of Contents
Businesses, Websites & Brand Image On The Internet
Businesses today largely operate online. How you present your online business to customers matters a lot, and first impressions typically play a role in whether a user trusts your products or not. One study suggests that users can determine good design work within 50ms of seeing it. Your website should be:
- Designed to look modern
- Easy to use and navigate
- Speed & design optimised for a range of devices
Competitor Analysis - Don't Reinvent The Wheel
It’s usually best to see how other companies have structured their content and design work. This saves you from trying to reinvent the wheel. If you’re making a website for a conference you should invest some time into researching what leading conference institutions are doing. It’s good to look at such things as:
- Page contents
- Navigation menu layout
- How they present their products
- Call to actions
Large institutions will likely have invested a lot of resources into their website content layout and design. They pages will have been tested to prove that they increase the conversion rates (conversion rate optimisation).
disclaimer: whilst you can get ideas from other websites, bare in mind they are catering for a specific audience. Whilst it’s good to take inspiration from other websites, your user base may or may not respond favourably.
User Needs & Personas
Great websites understand the needs of their users well. One way to learn about these needs is by engaging in various research techniques such as ethnographic interviews or surveys. Recruiting people to participate in this can be a challenge, but providing incentives helps. The data gathered can be used to develop a Persona (the book The About Face Chapters 1-7 cover this in detail), which is a commonly used tool in websites and other digital products. Persona’s are usually rough sketches of website users, their needs, and the tasks that they typically carry out. They are rough sketches because users and their needs are constantly changing and they’ll need to be revised. Design teams decide on which features to add to the website based on this Persona:
- The website structure
- The navigation menu layout
- Communication and language usage (what words would resonate the best?)
- The content strategy
- Feature requirements
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) & Keywords
Successful websites today are easily discovered on search engines like Google. Becoming discoverable is not very easy because google doesn’t really discuss how it works. Whilst they have provided quite a vague guide on how it ranks websites, their search algorithm is not visible to the public (open source). Most businesses are at the mercy of the Google Algorithm, and updates tend to cause havoc for SEO campaigns. The updates have been so problematic that in 2024, trends showed that agencies were moving their resources away from Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and expanding into Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising to reduce risk.
Recently there has been an increased interest in website backlinks and blogger relations to increase website authority and page ranking. In contrast there are more website-improvement-led SEO methods: Ahref’s Youtube Channel have demonstrated that improving user experience & functionality of the website itself can have a large impact on page ranking.
Google Keywords Planner is a tool that can be used to find keyword opportunities to get traffic to the website. Each page of your website should target high traffic keyword(s) that are not too competitive. Once we have settled on keywords, we will want to optimise the SEO page titles and meta descriptions to encourage users to click through to your website (click through rate). To make the website stand out from the crowd on Google they must communicate your business’ value proposition and also feature a call to action (‘Book your free consulation’). The image below shows how the homepage of my website displays on Google. In the description I discuss my offerings, and at the end it says ‘Book your free consultation!’.
After the website is live, we will want to track the progress of how the website is performing for the keywords, and also the click through rate. We can use the free tool Google Search Console (GSC) to find out which pages are getting lots of impressions and clicks. Google allows you to easily download & export your website data for analysis in a Google sheet or csv file for analysis.
The fact that business today have to rely on the Google algorithm fairly worrying. Google are a for profit company and their updates, whilst framed positively, may actually be done to increase their own profits. Updates cause large changes in SEO results, lead to a distrust in SEO campaigns and professionals and result is a reliance on ad spending.
Content Strategy
In the words of Nielsen Norman Group “A content strategy outlines how your team will use content to meet user needs and achieve organizational goals.” On websites, the main methods of communication are through text and imagery and they should be complementary and relevant to one another. Janice Redish, a pioneer in the field of content strategy, thought that websites should be designed like a conversation. The best websites understand how to start, lead and finish this conversation.
Part of content strategy includes keeping track of where all your branded content lives on the internet. Alongside your website may have a Google Business Profile or social media accounts. All the text should be consistent across platforms to increase trust in your brand. If a user sees outdated information they may assume that the organisation no longer exists. AI generated results may also pick up out dated information, which may be damaging.
Design For The User
The best websites ensure that all ideas are carried out with the user in mind. All important information should be easily found (also called discoverability) and users shouldn’t have to think much when they are navigating around. Steve Krug’s book Don’t Make Me Think does a great job explaining this.
Building easy to use websites gets more complicated when there is a lot of information (and pages) on your website. In order to make sure that users can use the website easily, we can test ideas out with users. For complex projects, doing this early is a great return on investment as problems can be identified early on and fixed. If your website is easy to use, users will come back again.
Sometimes users can’t find information on the website easily, or they get confused how to carry out common activities. These problems are introduced when designers make presumptions about the users level of ability. One way that we can find problems like this is by watching users interact with the website in person or online (also known as usability testing). We could also test the website navigation by using Tree Tests or Card Sorts. This would help to find out a better way of organising pages and categories in the navigation menu.
Accessible Design Work
Design work should complement the website content, making it as accessible as possible. Designers that are usability-focussed avoid animations, because they are distracting and can make text hard to read. For communication to be at all effective, a users must receive it, and they must process it. If the colour scheme is well designed, then all users should be able to read the text easily.
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) have provided a criteria called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1. Meeting this criteria ensures that less able users can use and navigate your websites easily.
To ensure that written content is usable by everyone, you should consider writing simple sentences, and avoiding jargon wherever possible.
Website Analytics
After the website is live, it is useful to see how users are interacting it. We can use a free tool like Google Analytics to do this. This can tell us information like:
- The pages that users are visiting most frequently
- How long they are staying on the pages for before exiting
- Which devices are being used to access the website
Best practice is to set this up using Google Tag Manager – be sure to also comply with GDPR laws and respect the consent of your users by adding a cookie banner to your website. Alongside this we can use another tool like Hotjar to provide a different variety of insights.
Hotjar provides a heatmap recordings feature, showing how users interact with the website. We can even install popup surveys to the website for feedback to ask questions such as ‘was this page useful?’ to identify weaknesses.
Without analytics websites become stale, and decision making becomes difficult.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
On your website you’ve provided an enquiry form or contact information so that users can get in touch with you. You might find the same questions being asked over and over again. This is a great time to add FAQs to your website. FAQs will be a great return on investment for three reasons:
- Satisfied users – information can be found easily. No enquiry has to be made, and users won’t need to wait around for you to reply. This is a better experience.
- Time savings – you won’t have to reply to as many questions.
- Peace of mind – following on from (2)
Keeping Proactive
We can keep on top of competition by staying proactive:
- Gather appropriate data
- Identify users needs
- Design around these needs
- Refresh website content
- Monitor page ranking, impressions and click through rate
- Monitor competitor sites
- Find new keyword opportunities
- Keep content fresh
Conclusion
Website standards are always changing with new technology, and what is considered good today may not be tomorrow. A pro active approach is required.
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