8 Essential Aspects of a High Quality Website

THE ANATOMY OF A HIGH QUALITY WEBSITe_

As the title of the article suggests, there is a lot to consider when creating a website that adds real value to your business. Ultimately, a website should facilitate a smooth, satisfying experience for the user, and achieving that means delivering on multiple metrics.

Your website, must immediately grab and keep the user's attention, it must deliver appropriate and meaningful content to them in such a way that they feel a sense of agency and control but at the same time are presented with information that enables them to build a story about you and your products or services.

Your website must also feel reactive, allowing the user to make easy, efficient and seamless transitions when searching for the information they seek. This concept becomes increasingly important with complex website that serve multiple purposes, and facilitate users with varied aims.This article aims to both highlight the process we use when building websites for our clients as well as address some of the common issues they have faced, in the hope that the solutions we presented to them could also be helpful to you if you’re struggling with your own website.

Key Website Goals

Who will be visiting your website?
What do you want users to do when they’re on your website?
How does the website move you towards your business goals?
What specific business problem does your website solve?

[two] - ux design/the user journey_

In User Experience Design (UX) the user journey refers to the process of guiding your users through the website towards the ultimate goal. Your website must present the users with any information they need in an accessible, intuitive way so they can complete their journey feeling satisfied.

Facilitating a great user journey requires a combination of different elements including easily digestible information, accessible links and buttons, logical navigation progression and more. The user journey is ultimately about marrying the users' needs with your business objectives resulting in a positive outcome for both parties.

Some key things to think about when mapping your website's user journey are…

Key User Journey Goals

What do your users want on the website?
What do your users need to feel comfortable making a purchase?
How can you make the journey as efficient as possible for the user?
What are the major milestones of the journey, towards the goal?

[three] - WEBSITE NARRATIVE_

The website narrative is technically separate from the user journey, but the two go hand in hand. Website narrative is concerned primarily with the story that the user builds in their mind about your business as they travel through the website. Obviously then, it’s important that this narrative is considered when planning out your user's journey to make sure that they are presented with the necessary information.

Mismanaging the website narrative can have two major negative consequences. If a user is presented with too much information too quickly, it can be overwhelming, which ultimately results in them losing interest and leaving the site. Similarly, if the user decides to take a route through the website that doesn’t follow the standard journey anticipated in the design, then they will receive information in a disjointed and illogical way. Ending in the same result, they will lose interest and leave.

To best avoid your users losing interest and leaving the site, it’s critical that the narrative and user journey are immediately compelling from the get-go. A typical website user spends 52 seconds browsing a website on average across all industries. Meaning, there’s not a lot of time to tell your story and get your message across.

With limited time available, it’s good practice to make your website scannable for the user. Again, the statistics suggest that only 16% of users actually read a given page word for word. Most scan the page, fishing for information that’s relevant to them. So facilitating this behaviour means making the most important information stand out on the site.

The journey and goal will be different for each business. But a useful formula to adopt when plotting a user journey is WHO - WHAT - HOW - WHY. We'll use an example of selling a product on your website to illustrate.

‍WHO...

‍The first piece of information the user needs to see is WHO, who are you? This information is usually delivered in the first section on the front page of the website and is the very first thing your website's users will see when the page is loaded.

‍WHAT...

‍The next logical step is to inform the user about WHAT you do. This information is commonly presented in the form of the value proposition, which you may have read about in some of my other posts. The value proposition section is usually seen immediately below the hero section and is a quick summary explaining the overall vision and offering of your business.

‍HOW...

‍Now the user knows who you are and what you do, they want to know HOW you do it, and HOW it benefits them. Depending on the layout and design of your website, these benefits can be presented in a variety of ways, but it’s important that they are easily accessible, easily digestible and immediately obvious.

‍WHY...

‍Finally, to complete their mental picture your user needs to understand WHY. WHY are you in the business you’re in and more importantly (to them) WHY do they need to care?

We have only covered the common use cases you will see on the homepage of a website to highlight the point, but this formula can be applied to every page of your website. The website as a whole also follows the same formula on a broader level.It’s also valuable to note that depending on the given layout and design of a website, the WHY and HOW can be interchanged. Ultimately, the end goal is the same, a user needs to be able to quickly and easily build a story in their mind about your business and offering.

Key UI Goals

What is the key piece of information your user needs to see?
How to reduce the clicks needed to access further information?
How to reduce the amount of movement your users need to do?
How can you reduce the amount of page transitions?

[five] - VISUAL DESIGN/BRAND IDENTITY flagship_

With UX and UI accounted for, Visual Design is centred around enhancing the aesthetic appeal of your website, this includes the selection of appropriate and impactful imagery, and engaging animations and static elements.

Visual design is also used to guide the user's eye and add visual depth to your website that highlights the content via a balance of colour blocks and whitespace, shapes and lines and design motifs and other graphical elements.Your company website will likely be the grandest brand asset you have and depending on your business goals and strategy, your website will also likely be the central hub of your digital presence.

As such it should be the best, most comprehensive representation of your brand visual and verbal identity. In the same way that a flagship store in the physical world is a showcase of a brand as much as it is a shopping outlet. Your website should be the equivalent in the digital world.

When designing the visual make-up of your website, some important things to note are…

Key Visual Goals

Does the look and feel of your website match that of your brand identity?
Does the visual layout help guide your user through their journey?
Are any of the visual elements competing for the eye's attention?
Are visual elements consistent throughout the website?

[six] - SEO/VISIBILITY AND GETTING SEEN_

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a very big subject and one that contains a lot more than I can address in a few sentences. But with that said, there are some essential things you must consider if you want to give your business the best possible chance to get your website in front of the people who value it.

SEO on a basic level is about ranking highly in the search results on Google etc. Most people only ever click on options from the first page of results when searching and so it’s obviously very important to be one of those options.

There are many opportunities, tips and tricks that you can take advantage of to boost your search engine rankings. We will briefly cover the most common ones below…

Unless you are in the fortunate but very unlikely position of operating in an unchallenged market, there will be a lot of competition on the web for products or services similar to your own.

01 - KEYWORDS
‍
Keywords in the context of SEO refer to related or associated words with the product, service or industry you operate in. The strategy here is to include as many of these words in your website and content copy as possible, in an effort to attract customers searching for those terms.

For example, let’s say that a company recycles ocean plastic to produce and market consumer lifestyle goods. Obviously, their keywords are ocean, plastic, lifestyle and recycle. But they would also benefit from utilizing other, related keywords like ocean pollution, oil, coast, marine life, clean, waste etc.

The list goes on, but the point here is that a person on Google will not always be searching for the exact terms that result in a hit for your website, but, by including additional words you can improve the odds of getting that hit.

02 - ON-SITE SEO
‍
‍On-site SEO relates to structuring your website in a way that allows search engines to “crawl” or analyze a website for the information it contains so that the search engine can first validate the site and then decide who to show it to. Again, there are many ways to optimize this, but one of the simplest ways is through the use of H tags. H1-H6. H1 or Heading 1 is the highest in the hierarchy and should be the page title, it immediately tells the search engine what the page is about, from there, your section headers should typically be combinations of H2, H3 and H4 depending on their importance. H5 and H6 are less common but they also follow the same hierarchical structure.

03 - TECHNICAL SEO
‍
‍For the sake of brevity, we will cover what we at Foundry Creative Studio consider to be the other SEO essential for your website, and that is the technical SEO. This refers to the infrastructure of your website such as the security, registration and DNS properties. Depending on what process you use to build and host your website, optimizing your technical SEO isn’t as scary as it sounds.

[seven] - WEBSITE FUNCTIONALITY_

The final major milestone of most website projects is the development phase. Coding the website to transform it from a static image to a fully functioning live site. Obviously, the website development process is another highly involved one that we can’t cover completely here.

But the key thing to highlight is the loading speeds of your website. Whether that’s the time it takes to load from the initial search, the time the site takes to render once it’s open or the time it takes to transition from page to page.

If your users have to wait too long they will simply abandon their pursuit before your site even displays. And when we say “wait too long”, we mean 2-3 seconds maximum. Studies have found that on average 47% of users expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less. So there really is an urgent need for speed.

You can mange your page loading speeds by asking yourself these questions…

Key Page Speed Goals

Are any of the images you use unnecessarily large files?
Do you have large graphical elements saved as images?
Do you have any duplicate or unnecessary code?
Can you use JPEG images to have less impact on performance?

Common Website UI & Navigation Issues

Are your fonts and typography properties legible on small devices?
Are your imagery & graphic elements still impactful on smaller devices?
Does your design effectively translate to a vertical layout?
Is your User Interface still satisfying experience on smaller devices?

eight essential aspects of a high quality website_

Key Website Goals

[two] - ux design/the user journey_

Key User Journey Goals

Key UI Goals

Key Visual Goals

Key Page Speed Goals

Common Website UI & Navigation Issues

more insights_

five essentials of building a successful company brand…

six INDICATIONS OF AN OUTDATED WEBSITE AND HOW TO FIX THEM…

foundry
creative
studio_

eight essential aspects of a high quality website_

Key Website Goals

[two] - ux design/the user journey_

Key User Journey Goals

Key UI Goals

Key Visual Goals

Key Page Speed Goals

Common Website UI & Navigation Issues

more insights_

five essentials of building a successful company brand…

six INDICATIONS OF AN OUTDATED WEBSITE AND HOW TO FIX THEM…

foundrycreativestudio_

foundry
creative
studio_