What Makes A Good Website?

Video – What Makes A Good Website?

Welcome to the first in our series of 10 micro-pod videos designed to answer some of the most common questions we get asked by prospective customers. Each week for the next 10 weeks, we’ll be answering a new question on a different topic of digital marketing and web design to help business owners better understand the digital landscape and potentially even answer questions that they didn’t realise they had.

You can view the first video below where we explore the question “what makes a good website?”. The answer isn’t as straight forward as we might like, but we’ve given an honest assessment of what makes a good website and have included a couple of practical things that you can look at to see whether your current website is cutting the mustard.

If you have a specific question that you’d like to see answered, feel free to reach out to Ryan via email and he’ll be happy to make sure that your question gets covered in a future video.

Video Transcript

It’s a question we get quite a lot is “what makes a good website?” and the honest answer is that it depends. It’s an awkward answer but it’s the truth. The reason it depends is it depends on the industry you’re in. If you’re an online retailer what works for your website and your audience is going to be different from a local service provider where you don’t sell online.

That being said, there are a few principles that you should almost always stick to regardless of the industry you’re in. The first being making sure your website works really well on mobile, almost better on mobile than it does on desktop. The vast majority of industries have seen a shift, probably in the last 5 years, between the majority of their visits being from desktop to the majority of their visits being from mobile. It’s natural for business owners and sometimes even marketers to get a bit of tunnel vision on the desktop because that’s what they’re used to seeing while they’re at work, but the reality is that your customers are more likely to see it on a mobile. So, you need to make sure that all of the information that they need is prominently displayed and your conversion points, so your phone number, your contact form, etc. are all super visible and not hidden, certainly not halfway down the page which a customer is unlikely to see.

The second being security. Security is something that the average user is becoming far more aware of. With SSL certificates, the padlock that you see in an address bar is something that people are far more aware of. It’s also something that Google and other search engines are actually focussing on more now as well, because it means that you’re taking care of the information that’s being submitted through your website. So, by having an unsecure website you’re not sending the right signals to your visitor to to search engines that you’re a reputable place to go.

So those are just two things that are really good to look at when looking is your website doing the job or not. But [the answer] will really depend on what industry you’re in.