What Makes a Good Website?
Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 11:25AM 
Welcome to my new website.... I figured I needed to start practicing what I preached and after 2 years, finally came to my senses and took my old Flash-laden site down, complete with all its broken links and cumbersome loading times.
So the platform I have moved to is the platform I use when I design sites for clients. It's been an interesting thought process to go through actually. I really liked my old site. It had flashy graphics and things that moved and whizzed around and everyone always commented on it.
But it wasn't practical and didn't do me any favours in the SEO and social media departments. Making a decision to go from 'pretty' to 'functional' was hard for me. Despite the fact that I will tell any client any day of the week to get rid of 'pretty' (and sometimes downright ugly) to build 'functional.'
So then yesterday I crowdsourced some research. I asked the Twitter-sphere 'What Makes a good website?' Here's the responses I received:
- Content is King!
- Focus
- Content
- Mixed Media
- Clarity of Message
- Bug Free
- Accessibility
- Free of Spelling Errors
- Easy to Navigate
Hardly surprising, but the overarching feedback was that sites needed to be content-focused. Way cool! The transition is slowly being made from the 'online brochure' to sites that actually provide meaningful information. Imagine a site that might actually help people in making a buying decision by positioning the company or person as an expert in their field? All achieved through good, solid, reputable information, rather than pretty graphics and tricky navigation.
Keep the ideas coming on what makes a great site. I'd love to develop a white paper on your experiences of good vs bad in website development.