I heard lots of time a single quote that a website must has all the quality content, design, color combination, templates and other things that attract its visitors and keep stay them for long time. But who can i judged visitors taste and interest while developing website?
This is actually a very good question. I get this a lot, mostly because my prices are higher than usual web developers. Why should you invest in the website? See, the first fact that you have to tell yourself is that your website is your asset. Its your property. its your business proposition. You expect it to make money for you and provide returns. And who is going to be the end user of your website? Your visitor! The challenge here is to keep them engaged to your website for hours until it generates revenue for you - be it purchases, traffics, ad clicks, anything! The key here is to put yourself in the visitor's shoes. If I give you a set of bricks and mortar to build your own house, what will you do? You will want it to be beautiful, accessible, decorated, pleasant to your eyes, proper ventilation, and everything you could possibly think of. When its ready, you will want to be at home all the time. You will not want to go to public toilets and would rather wait to reach home first. And other advantages. Similarly, your website has the same case. Only, the residents are the visitors and not you. All these are included under the same roof of UX and UI (User Experience and User Interface). First, your website must be appealing to the eyes of the visitor. A little fancy effects here and there will get the customer engaged for sometime. Next, the manouver around the website needs to be efficient. At most, visitors should only click not more than 3 hyperlinks to get to the point where the information they require resides. Apart from that, the content has to be engaging with well written copy-writing that will get them into the mood of wanting to know more. Remember, you have just ONE chance. A visitor will come to your website and you have that one chance to win him over. And the first line of persuasion is the web experience itself. You might have the best product in the market, but just because your website didn't appeal, you might just lose one sale and another and another. Who judges this then? If you don't have experience in web development, you will always think that whatever you have is nice. But it may not be the case. Get a proper web designer, who has been doing this for years. Look at their portfolio and judge the design. If it appeals to you, its worth investing your money into it. You are the judge. Hope that helps.
I see the quality content mostly meant for SEO. However, the rest of factors are how you can retain the visitor in your website. The longer the stay in your website, the higher changes they will re-visit your site again or perhaps, turn the conversion into sales. I very hard to justify the right design, but you can use the bound rate (google analytic) to rate your site relevancy to the captured visitors.
A good appearance certainly helps in drawing the attention of the consumer, but it hardly holds any influence in making the visitor stay put in your website. This is where the role of user-friendliness comes into forefront. If you do not have a user-friendly website then, there is absolutely no sense in wasting money for hosting that particular website. If your website is blessed with a structured interface, it can turn out to be qualitative and money-generating tool. From driving traffic to your business and assuring a stay of the visitors on your web pages for a longer period. When it comes to designing a user-friendly website, a lot of factors tend to play a collective role in determining the success of the same. Qualities like: A good layout focusing on the essential and relevant information is a must. You must neither opt for an empty nor a cluttered layout. It is essential that you give much attention towards the load time of your website. After all, a website with a fast load time easily is sure to strike a chord with the user. Make proper use of menus; the focus must lay on making navigation easier for the users to your website. Content is the king. A striking website without any information lacks appeal. You must ensure the presence of quality content in your site for enhanced user-friendliness.
sometimes it so happens that the designs are highly creative, color-schemes are fantastic and everything is just great except it does not benefit the people for whom the website is created – the users. What happens is this: you are lead by your preferences, creating designs that you like or feel suitable for the website. However, remember that the website is for web users. They are the ones who are going to spend the most time on your website. A website lacking retainable quality will fail to keep the viewers engaged. Remember, your website viewers may not be tech-savvy but they know what they want and will be expecting that from your website. Fulfilling their expectations will benefit you. So make sure your web design gives its users what they desire. Great look, quality content and comfortable navigation leads to an effective website.
Its only to make your website user's eye candy,it makes traffic higher and make your site highly authorised. Specially when you are in Ecommercial business then designing is preference....
that's like asking why unattractive women get less attention than the pretty ones. Sure she may have a great personality but are you going to do a double take when she walks by? hell no. Sad but true.
Having attractive and user friendly website, the website should also contain good quality content to engage visitors more on as if it has no good quality content then it will result in heavy bounce rates.
Here is my version when someone ask this question: - since there is million factors and signals, don't try to think about that. This about HOW TO MAKE YOUR SITE UNIQUE in every sense: content and design. That is all you need to keep in mind, simplified theory. I know people who don't know anything about SEO and even didn't try to learn, they just make sites about thinks they love.
I don't think Craigslist ever won a design award However, it is wildly popular with it's users. And have you seen the newly redesigned Yahoo site? Nothing great there, either. The only two questions that matter are: Does it meet the needs of the user? Does it make any money for the owner? Here's a good article that has examples of ugly but effective websites: http://webitect.net/design/does-design-matter-five-ugly-websites-that-kill-the-competition/ Enjoy!
Stephan is on to something there -- as he asks the BIG question: "Does it meet the needs of the user?" That's called accessibility... the very definition of user friendly. As I was told about a decade ago and continue to repeat almost daily, users do NOT visit websites for the goofy graphics or flashy "gee ain't it neat" javascripted bull people crap all over their websites with, they visit FOR THE CONTENT. No matter how much you stroke the designers... ego, or let the script-tard piss all over the page with megabytes of crap that just gets in the way, what matters is the content, and delivering that content in as accessible a manner to as many people as possible... a concept that at times seems outright alien to all those "designers" out there who don't know enough about HTML, CSS or accessibility to be designing JOKER FOXTROT SIERRA! Look at the big success stories of the web -- Amazon, e-bay, craigslist, Google, baidu, facebook -- we're not exactly talking a visual tour-de-force here, what you have is content of value people want! Most of them aren't even all that great on accessibility or are slowly losing it over time (Google and Amazon in particular which is why I've been hunting for viable alternatives). To imitate Steve Ballmer, CONTENT! CONTENT! CONTENT! CONTENT! CONTENT! CONTENT! CONTENT! CONTENT! YES! For anything starting out you cannot afford to alienate ANY potential visitors, wait until you are big and REALLY have content people want before you do that -- this means your focus should be (and should remain) CONTENT OF VALUE delivered in as ACCESSIBLE a manner as possible. This means paying attention to accessibility guidelines (that most "designers" will never understand which is why most "designers" again have NO BUSINESS drawing their goofy assed PSD's and calling them websites), developing using semantic markup so that when all your fancy tech is unavailable (screen readers, braille readers, less capable user agents, AND search engines) the page still works and so things like heading navigation or accesskeys menus function. (something else most people crapping out websites have never even heard of)... Semantic markup of your content or a reasonable facsimile, bend that markup to your will with CSS to create your layoutS (yes, PLURAL) in as accessible a manner as possible (fluid/semi-fluid, dynamic fonts, dynamic max-width, media queries for responsive layout), THEN bring in the photoshop jockey (maybe) to make the goofy graphics to hang around the content (maybe, CSS3 is increasingly making the PSD wankers less and less relevant). Starting from a goofy PSD or even a bunch of PSD's is putting the cart before the horse, and the road to failure so far as web development is concerned... The only reason it's become accepted practice and the norm is the suits writing the paychecks being more easily wowed by the flashy graphics while failing to grasp that no matter how pretty it is, if it's useless to end users what the blue blazes good is it? Pretty much the industry has been taken over by two types of artists -- Photoshop artists and SEO scam artists -- and to be frank both are as a rule of thumb scam artists and on the whole everyone is suffering through crappy websites because of it!
Like mentioned above already. Depending on the site,..Its a combonation of Content and Looks and your Market...