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How To Make The Best Website

In this blog post we will raise awareness of some concepts that can be applied when building websites. We will also show how that websites play a key role in communicating for a business, and how that it is an ongoing process to keep content fresh and monitor progress.

Table Of Contents

Businesses, Websites & Brand Image On The InternetUser Experience
Competitor Analysis – Don’t Reinvent The Wheel
User Needs & Personas
Search Engine Optimisation & Keywords
Content Strategy
Design With The User In Mind
Accessible Design Work
Data Strategy
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Keeping Proactive

Conclusion

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 in 50ms of seeing it. Your website should be:
  • Designed well
  • Easy to use
  • Easy to navigate
  • 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 messaging 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:
  • Website structure
  • Navigation menu layout
  • Presentation of business objectives
  • Feature usage
  • Call to actions
Large institutions will likely have invested a lot of resources into their websites and even test to see if features improve 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 and design for these users. This requires rolling up the sleeves and engaging in various customer research techniques. Defining your website user base is the first step. After that you can recruit (also known as screening) some of these people for ethnographic interviews, and surveys. Once this is done you can begin to paint a rough picture about who your users are, and how they will think and interact with your website. A common tool in User Experience is called the Persona. See the book The About Face Chapter 7 for more information. Building a Persona will help with:
  • The website structure
  • The navigation menu layout
  • Communication and language usage
  • The content strategy
  • Feature requirements

Search Engine Optimisation & Keywords

Successful websites today are easily discovered on Google (It is the unfortunate most businesses are at the mercy of the Google Algorithm. Trends in 2024 show agencies moving away from SEO due to how susceptible it is to change) . 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. 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. 

Content Strategy

In the words of Nielsen Norman Group “content strategy outlines how your team will use content to meet user needs and achieve organizational goal is how you communicate ideas on your website”. The main methods of communication are text and imagery. 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.

Design With The User In Mind

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 this case it can be a good idea test ideas out with users before settling on something. This will be a good return on investment because your website users will see your website favourably and choose you over competitors.

Sometimes users can’t find information on the website easily, or they get confused how to carry out common activities (we may presume this is obvious stuff). We can find these problems 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.

Data Strategy

After the website is live we can keep up to date with how users are interacting with the website by using the free tool like Google Analytics. 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. Also we can use the free tool Hotjar to record  heatmaps can give us more 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 – asking questions such as ‘was this page useful’ can help find problems

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 overall user experience for users. 
  • Time savings – you’ll have to reply to less questions that you perceive as daft.
  • Peace of mind – following on from (2)
In short designing an FAQ section will not require many resources, it can improve your brand image, and save you time

Keeping Proactive

We can keep on top of competition by staying proactive:
  • Listen to user needs by using appropriate data gathering methodology
  • satisfy these needs, applying data to support decision making
  • Refresh the website content often
  • Monitor page ranking, impressions and click through rate
  • Monitor competitor sites
  • Find new keyword opportunities

Conclusion

There are many pieces to the website puzzle and there is no one size fits all approach. To make the best website, a proactive mentality is required. Don’t let your site just sit there and get outdated, instead use it to communicate your ideas and your offerings.

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