What makes a good website? What were you thinking while reading that sentence? Well, when you’re surfing the web, may be you only think about whether or not it’s fun and attractive. What are the essential traits of great Web sites?
After you visit a site and find yourself staying awhile, what makes you stay? A sense of humor helps. Flashy graphics are nice. But the fundamental traits that make a site work are more elusive. This article will talk about many things about the essential characteristics of great websites.
- Pages download quickly
- Animated graphics turn off by themselves
- Links are underline so they are instantly clear to the visitor
- Every web page in the site looks like it belongs to the same site; there are repetitive elements that carry throughout the pages
- Pages within the website link back to the home page, and to elsewhere in the site
- Buttons are not big and dorky
Text and Navigation
- Background does not interrupt the text
- Text is big enough to read, but not too big
- The hierarchy of information is perfectly clear
- Navigation is consistent throughout the web
- Navigation buttons and bars provide the visitor with a clue as to where they are, what page of site they are currently on
Who Made It?
Anyone can make a Web page. In fact, anyone can make a Web page and lie about who they are! You could make a Web page that said you were Celine Dion, and no one would stop you from putting it on the Web. But sites that really belong to the people should have some way to contact the people responsible for the site; usually an e-mail address, sometimes a phone number and street address, too.
- Original and easy to read
- Valuable and attractive Share everything you learn
- Well organized
- Dominate a subject area; become the site for that subject.
- Custom-tailored the information to user preferences
Are There A lot of Adds?
Ads can be long, rectangular banners at the top or bottom of the screen, or sometimes they are on the left or right side of the screen. It’s not always easy to recognize all the ads on a page; sometimes ads will look like messages from your computer, or just like part of the website that you’re looking at. Teach yourself to spot ads, and be aware that if a website has a lot of ads, you may want to think twice about whether the information on it is unbiased. However, many valuable sites do contain advertising to help support themselves.
