What makes a website work?

As the internet becomes more deeply entrenched into the world’s social fabric, designing an effective website simply makes good business sense. An effective website represents the quality of your brand in the best ways possible, helps you target a specific audience, helps you generate leads for marketing purposes, and, ultimately, helps you convert potential customers into paying customers. As the world wide web moves closer to the twenty-five year anniversary of its existence, digital marketers have plenty of information to describe the characteristics of an effective website.

Search Engine Optimization

An effective website, first and foremost, is a website that people visit. If no one can find your website then all the effort you put into your website’s design is for naught. Understanding the way search engines work is the first step to running an effective website.

Think of search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing as gigantic answer machines. You ask a question, or put in a search term, and the search engines pores over all the information on the internet almost instantaneously to deliver you a list of places where the answer to your question might be found. One of the most fundamental characteristics of an effective website is placing your website as high as possible on the list of websites that a search engine returns to users.

Web designers call this process search engine optimization. The key to search engine optimization is understanding the algorithms search engines use to conduct their searches. These algorithms are constantly being tweaked and it will be important for you to stay on top of the latest trends.

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Content is Still King

The bread and butter of an effective website is clear, engaging, and purposeful content. Search engines send what are called “crawlers” through a website’s content to determine if that website has information relevant to a user’s search terms. To give your website the best chance of being selected by a search engine, you need content. It is not enough to fill your website with lots and lots of content. You want that content to be fresh, original, and engaging. In much the same way that you need people to find your website, you also want people to stay and read the content on your website once they happen upon it. This has not changed since the first search engines were born.

Be User Friendly

Potential customers find nothing more annoying than a website that just will not work right. Another characteristic of an effective website, then, is user friendliness. Make sure your website displays information in a carefully thought-out, clear, and coherent manner. Display important information like contact information, what services and products your business provides, and the means for purchasing your product or service prominently. Double-check that all the links you provide on your website are still active.

Commit your website to operating smoothly. Loading time is an important factor. Loading time refers to the time it takes for your website to load after someone clicks on it. A good rule of thumb is that most customers will leave your website if it does not load within four to six seconds.

Remain Faithful to Your Conversion Path

You have undoubtedly spent a long time carefully mapping out a conversion path for your target consumer base. Do not forsake this path when it is time to build your website. In fact, integrate principles from your conversion path into the design of your website. In this way, you can maximize the number of visitors to your website that become paying customers.

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