6 Essentials for a functional website
Look! Beautiful, isn’t it? Your website is up for the world to see and use.
Or can they? You know how to get around your website and you know how to find your website, but can anyone else? Basically, is it functional?
For a website that works, makes sales, finds leads and meet any other purpose you had in mind there are seven questions you should keep in mind when analyzing your website.
1. What is the purpose?
Websites offer numerous uses and options to provide products, services and information, to name only a few, online.Take a look at the Amazon.com website which has several uses, such as comparing products or reading reviews, but the one sole purpose of the site is to sell product. All the different tools, features and uses are intended to drive the visitor to buy more product.
2. Who will be using your website?
Who is your visitor? Would you have the same website design or even the same style of writing for an audience of 14 year old girls as you would to an audience of men over 45. Consider age, gender, demographics, social class, and so on…
3. Consider what your visitor intends to do when they arrive.
Know your visitor type! You should have some sense of what their purpose for being on your site is and how they perIs it clear how to use it?
4. Is it clear how to use it?
A good website design will speak for itself. Your visitor should not have to guess or work at figuring out what your website is about, what your product or service is, or how to find it. Essentially, what’s in it for the visitor?
A clever or too stylish website navigation system means visitors have no idea how to use it or where to go next. If it’s the least bit difficult to use and understand it won’t get used at all — meaning it won’t achieve its goal, and in turn means it doesn’t function.
5. Does it engage your visitor?
Good design draws you in through visual appeal, and can be a combination of feel, ease of use, or absolute amazement. Keep in mind aesthetics are only part of what makes a website engaging. Leading them to the next step without hesitation or question of where to go next engages the visitor to exploring further until they have taken the action you want them to.
6. Can your website be found?
When people use the internet to research or search for a specific product or company it is essential that your website is built for google, yahoo and msn (the major search engines) to find and index your website. The biggest mistake is content and wording that is built into the website as a graphic. If you can’t highlight those keywords people use to search for you – the search engines can’t read them, which means they can’t find you.
