8 Essential Attributes of a Great Website

If you’d like to have a great website, whether you are building it yourself or hiring a professional web design firm to build one for you, there are 8 essential attributes any great website will have.

1. A great website generates results

There can be many different goals for a website, but any great website should start out with some goals in mind and the effectiveness of the site can be judged by how well it meets those goals.

If your website is just a basic brochure and it doesn’t generate any measurable results you are probably missing some opportunities.

2. A great website loads quickly

Web visitors aren’t going to hang around waiting while your website pulls itself together and inches onto their browser. A great website is optimized to load quickly without sacrificing any visual quality and hosted on a web server and hosting network that has plenty of capacity to serve up the site quickly with no errors or delay.

3. A great website is accessible from a variety of different platforms and browsers

While most visitors are using the latest versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer®, there are many visitors finding their way to your site on a variety of different devices. These include mobile devices like iPhone and Blackberry and less popular computer browsers like Chrome, Safari, and older versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox. It’s important that your site adapt gracefully to these devices so the broadest possible range of visitors will have a good experience using your site.

4. A great website is secure

Hackers benefit from stealing credit card information or social security numbers and selling them to the highest bidder. If your site doesn’t contain this type of information, the next best thing for hackers is embedding malicious code in the site so that visitors will install their virus and their computer can be added to the network of machines the hacker controls.

Whatever your site’s purpose is it’s important that it be secure so that it adequately protects customer information and prevents malicious users from modifying the content.

5. A great website is flexible and adaptive to future requirements

The great thing about the web is that it isn’t like printed collateral, as your business or message changes so should your website. If a website is constructed well it can adapt to a variety of future changes and requirements with ease.

6. A great website is easy to use

If your visitors have to search for the main navigation or hunt around for a particular link or information they will probably take their business somewhere else. Your website should be easy to use so that visitors can find the information they are looking for or complete a purchase quickly and easily.

7. A great website is an effective business tool

A business tool like a great website works for you when you’re asleep or on vacation. If your website can service customers, manage data, complete orders, or deliver sales then it’s an effective business tool. If it doesn’t do any of those things and just costs you money month after month, then it’s not an effective business tool and it needs to be upgraded or replaced.

8. A great website is reliable

Reliability can mean a lot of things when it comes to a website but they are all important. Your website should be reliable so that it loads every time it’s requested with uptime as close to 100% as possible. Your website should be reliable so that when visitors complete a purchase or fill out a contact form there are no errors or lost orders. Your content management system should be reliable so making changes can be accomplished quickly and easily without messing up your site.