leafgrafica

Quality website – The definition

The assessment of a website in terms of quality, lacks a single point definition.It is the combination of various factors – Tech, aesthetic, logic etc etc to name a few broadly.As a friend of mine says “Web sites are often like art. What one person finds attractive or interesting, another might absolutely hate.” The most obvious factor is Visual appeal or looking good, as quality is often attributed to sites that are visually attractive.THIS IS THE BIGGEST MISTAKE AS LOOKS CAN BE DECEPTIVE. Once you remove the value of a brand image or the site content itself, the criteria for defining website quality is as follows - user friendliness, backend & engineering, logic, design, stickiness and search engine friendliness.Results, or Return On Investment (ROI), were intentionally left out of my list to help us focus more on the quality of the site rather than the results generated. ROI is also based on external factors, such as the price of product the good or service itself, and any marketing efforts.

Here is how I define the top factors that contribute to website quality.



User Friendliness

The manner in which a site takes a visitor through the path of achieving desired objectives is paramount. Clear navigation, legible content, simple instructions, clean page layouts, easy search functions and professionalism all contribute to a site’s user friendliness.



The Backend & Engineering

For the longest time, the Volvo was a car recognized for strength and safety, not its aesthetics. The hallmark of quality for the Volvo was its build, not its look. In the same vein, solid website engineering starts with proper planning of how the site will be strategically constructed and how its parts will fit together to make it run smoothly. Proper architecture is essential to accommodate a website’s requirements, to ensure structural scalability, flexibility, security, and to meet performance demands - now and in the future. At best, a completed site should comply with accepted programming standards. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an organization committed to creating programming standards for HTML, XHTML and CSS. Other known web programming standards extend to accessibility compliance and security best practices. A website relies on its server’s hardware, software, and infrastructure. While programming style helps, a website’s server or hosting environment can contribute to the site’s security and performance.



Logic

A site needs to function well between the design and code. The way the visual component, logic, and database integrations work will improve the efficiency of future additions and updates.



Design

Not only does a site need to make sense visually, it should read the same across all computer platforms (PC and Mac) and all web browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera). Effective site design should communicate an image/brand and help to achieve the site’s goals and objectives. Good design should make a site simple to use. However, some aspects of good design are subjective and it’s only through continual testing that you will figure out what works best for the intended audience.



Stickiness

Stickiness is the ability to ensure that the viewer/user sticks on the website pages for a longer time. A sticky site is a place people will visit again. By creating an atmosphere that people like to revisit, one can increase their exposure to their product or service - hence more sales. Repeat traffic is the lifeblood of any business. The benefits of a Sticky Website are :



1. One-to-One Relationships Are Created

2. Repeat Traffic / Increased Sales

3. Performance Through Feedback



Search Engine Friendliness

Believe it or not search engines are important to your websites success. At the very least your website should be search engine friendly. Search engines should be able to easily extract all the content you want made public online and display relevant pages from your site within their search results. Many in the SEO industry argue against any standards since major search engines have their own way of defining relevant search results for particular keyphrase. The three major search engines (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) have joined efforts to create some standards related to the most effective way to crawl a website. This collaborative initiative is sitemaps.org, which outlines the protocol for a website site map and instructs each engine on which pages to crawl, how often to crawl them, and how relevant they are. There are other common best practices for redirection, avoidance of deceptive tactics like cloaking and hidden text, as well as labels for important content, and linking tactics.

I’m not a programmer or a designer - I’m a marketer, so it’s difficult for me to say that one quality is more important than another. However, by virtue of having involved myself as part of Team Leafgrafica on many website projects, I can say that approaching website design and development in the order that I have outlined has lead to many successful website projects.

Shankar Ayatu,
Client Strategist
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