Good and bad sites. What’s the difference? 12 factors for evaluating the quality of a website
Introduction
A good website is not an abstract concept. The site can be broken down into components and evaluated according to a set of criteria.
Here we will define these criteria so that you can independently understand which site is good and which is bad.
Some criteria are objective, i.e. they do not depend on the judgments of individual people. Others can be expressed in the form of subjective evaluations.
Use these factors to improve your sites.
The speed of the site
A slow site makes users nervous. A slow site takes more time to solve problems. Some users will not reach their goals, i.e. they will reduce the site’s conversion rate.
To improve the site performance, use Google Pagespeed.
See also the article How to create a quick site
Withstanding loads
Your site may work fine for a single user, but if 30 people visit the site at the same time, the site starts to slow down. This is due to the speed, resource costs for processing a single server, application settings, and server capacity.
There is a good free tool for checking the site’s performance under load loader.io
See the article where we describe how we did it load tests for our Falcon Space platform.
Clarity, convenience and simplicity
The simpler the site, the faster the user will find what they need. The user must clearly understand what is where he is, and what can be done on the page.
You can implement many small improvements in the site that simplify the use of the site’s functionality.
Read the article How to make a convenient website.
See also The Falcon Space Platform Usability Guide.
Best Book on Site Usability — Steve Krug Don’t Make Me Think.
Adaptability of the interface to different screens
The user can work with the site from a phone, tablet, laptop or large monitor.
If you are sharpened only for a certain screen width, all other devices will “longing”.
There is a trend towards increasing the use of mobile devices. When designing a website, first of all consider mobile devices.
Our Falcon Space platform initially has an adaptive interface. You can try watching our demo booth from your phone — example of web platform components
Reliability
The reliability of the site is the absence of errors in the code, the ability to quickly recover from a failure, and the protection of the system from user errors.
There can be errors in any system, and each system will sooner or later give a denial of service. But one system can crash every day, and the other 1 time in 5 years.
The issue of reliability is complex and concerns all levels of the application — the work of service personnel, server administration, project development and maintenance, and the smoothness of incident response procedures.
Attractiveness
External attractiveness is very important for the first impression of the site. Especially in cases of attracting customers to the site.
At the same time, it is not so much the appearance that should be attractive, as the competent design of the content on the site. You can post very beautiful illustrations, but if you have bad uninteresting content that is difficult to read-this will not work.
See the article about the design of Falcon Space — How to make a good website design.
Clear structure
A good site structure makes it easier to understand the site, what to expect from it, and where to look for the necessary information.
The structure should be based on the interests of groups of site visitors, and not on the needs of the site owner.
One of the options for determining the structure of the site is from the search queries of users. You combine the queries into groups that respond to a specific need of the user.
An alternative option is to divide the site into services for different user roles (suppliers, customers).
Having a good site structure, it is convenient to track site traffic in web analytics (for example, Yandex. Metrica)
Conciseness and specificity
The texts should be as clear as possible and not contain water.
There is a lot of “nothing” material on the Web.
The user will be grateful to you if you save him from unnecessary wandering around your site.
Optimization for SEO
Your site may be very good, but if it is not seen by search engines, then there will be no result.
It is the search traffic that is the key.
It is necessary to develop the site in such a way that search engines can programmatically analyze it and add it to their index.
There are various automatic SEO audits of the site, which allow you to identify basic errors that prevent promotion in search engines.
See the series of articlesPromotion of the site in the network.
The correct sequence of links to attract customers (links to the offer)
Linking could be attributed to SEO, because it strongly affects it.
However, linking is a deeper concept. Visitors to your site are at different stages of making a purchase decision.
Imagine that we are selling a remedy for baldness.
Someone already knows that they have a problem (they are going bald). And someone is young and fresh, and does not think about it yet.
And someone has tried all the means, and no longer knows what to do. Someone uses your remedy and wants to know about the contraindications.
Each of the visitors has different tasks and goals.
Our task is to give him what he needs and gradually push him to the next step on the way to buying your baldness remedy.
Due to the correct links, you will gradually lead the visitor to the desired offer.
If you immediately give a direct offer, it may simply not be ready. He’s on another rung, and he’s not going to rub your cream on his head yet.
It’s like a web, you gradually pull the visitor along the threads from the periphery (articles about problems, reviews, HOW, WHAT, etc.) to the center of the web (the main offer).
Functionality
The site must solve the user’s problem. That’s the main thing. Too much functionality is just as bad as not having it..
The easier the tool is to use, the more people will use it.
Our platform offers a wide range of features for a web portal , but you don’t necessarily need to use them all. Proceed from the user’s goals. “Why did he come to this page?” — here is the best question for determining what should be on the page.
See also demo stand of components for viewing the capabilities of Falcon Space.
The ability to quickly edit and development
If the site is not developing, probably no one needs it.
With active operation, a lot of new ideas arise, problems are identified during use.
It will be good if you can quickly make the necessary edits as the project progresses.
If you have a slow cycle of making changes, then the development of the project will be slow.
Our platform allows you to make edits to the business logic of the project on the fly from the developer’s dashboard. If you know SQL and the basics of layout, you will be able to make edits on your own right in the course of using the project.
Conclusion
There is no clear scale that can separate good sites from bad ones.
The site may be frightening, run slowly, but at the same time to carry out their tasks.
The main task is not to separate a bad site from a good one.The main goal is to improve your site.
Identify your weakest points, think of a plan to improve them.
If you dig a little deeper-come up with your own narrower quality criteria and evaluate the site based on these criteria. Take our list as a basis and expand it to suit your specific needs.
Originally published at https://falconspace.site/blog/khoroshiy-i-plokhoy-sayty--v-chem-raznica