What Makes a Great Website?

1. DESIGN & LAYOUT
The first and the most important emphasis should be on the design of the website. This is because in today’s competitive market, the website requires a beautiful layout which is easy to understand, easy to navigate, informative and attractive!

2. RESPONSIVE
It is a digitally advancing and a highly competitive era! Marketers are doing everything they can to make the visitor stay on their website for long and initiate a call to action. In such a volatile scenario, the need for the website to be responsive becomes important.
In the past few years, the use of smartphones has grown rapidly. Thanks to the roll of 4G internet, people are now using increasingly using smartphones. By the end of 2016, mobile web usage crossed desktop for the first time, proving that people browse on smartphones and tablets instead of a laptop or desktop computer. For this reason alone, it becomes of utmost importance to invest in a responsive web design so that the website works well both on a desktop as well as a smartphone and other device screens. 

3. INFORMATIVE & VALUABLE
In order to be seen as a reliable information source and a trustworthy online business, the website must have relevant and concise content which should be grammatically correct and easy to grab. One should always keep in mind that people use Internet for searching valuable information. Therefore, your website should be such that it gives some value to the visitor or else he will look for another website which has what he needs. 

4. COMPATIBLE
There are many web browsers on the internet. For the website to be great, it requires to work in Google Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera, etc. Confirming the HTML code of the website is a way of ensuring your presence on every web browser. However, the concluding test should be to look at the website in various browsers.

5. QUICK TO LOAD
People on the internet are impatient, in case the website takes too long to respond, the surfer will click away. Don’t forget to optimize the graphic files and ensure they have a small size without compromising on the quality of the picture. This step will make sure that your website is quick to load.

6. MULTIMEDIA CONTENT
Multimedia content involves everything from texts to images to audio & video clips, animations, movies and music. Adding good multimedia content to your website is a sure way of attracting more visitors to your webpage. Today the viewers demand visuals. A brand without any images, audio, video cannot build its awareness.
Technically, when the search engines crawl your content, they search for keywords and phrases which in turn increase your ranking. Don’t forget to add metadata to every multimedia you add to your website. As stated in point 3, make sure that your image size is appropriate and your video loads quickly in order to ensure speedy page load. 

7. SITE NAVIGATION

When a visitor visits your website, it should be easy for them to access the information. Many surveys suggest that if visitors don’t find the information they are looking for in three clicks or less, they will switch to other websites. 

8. OFFERS
One sure thing that attract visitors to your website are the offer coupons, fun and freebies, interactivity. 

9. CALL TO ACTION
CTA i.e. Call To Action is the way through which you can make your visitors take actual steps towards becoming customers/clients. A CTA bridges the gap between a lead and a conversion. A CTA uses terms and phrases like “call now”, “find out more”, “buy now” etc.

10.  LINK TO SOCIAL MEDIA HANDLES
The main aim of linking your website with your social handles is to ensure that your internet presence is felt by the visitors. It becomes important because it can help nurture your website’s visitors. It can help you to stay in touch with the visitors who stayed on your page but did not convert. Assuming that you have rich content on your social media handles, you can influence such visitors through your content (both organically and paid). This step also helps in building trust and demonstrating authenticity. 

Conclusion:
These are the must haves one needs for making a great website. Sticking to old ways and layouts of a website can prove to be dangerous in today’s level of competition. Keeping a consistent check on how your website is performing and in what ways can you further optimize your website is of great importance. Also, one thing to remember is to have patience.

So what are you waiting for? Make your dream website turn into a reality!