Three

This morning, Karin and I met with an organization that's preparing to re-do their website. They're going about it the right way — starting with basic strategy and planning — and we were asked to submit a proposal to lead them through this process. Since that's basically what I do here, I was there to talk about it.

During some great Q&A, they asked a very, very good question:
What are the three most important things to a great website?

Karin has her answers; here are mine:

  1. Focus. It's tempting to try to tell a story about everything to everyone. This is a great way to make something that's not useful to anyone. Focus sharpens content, sharpens message, and most importantly, helps your visitors!
  2. Clarity. Clarity comes from focus. But even if you focus your content well, it must be well organized and presented. Clarity helps your visitors.
  3. Standards. Web sites and applications should adhere to published web standards. The process of creating semantic markup that is standards compliant naturally results in a site that works well even on old browsers and handheld devices, is accessible to the visually impaired, and is easily indexed by search engines (helping people find your site). Web standards help your visitors. (Do you detect a pattern here?)

    And then, because really items 1 & 2 are nearly inseparable, I allowed myself a number four.

  4. CONTENT! Because this is why people are coming to your site. Ultimately, this is the only reason they're coming, so make it worth their while.

So those are my top three (or four) elements of a great web site.

What are yours?

Comments

Sunday, Nov 23, 2008 / 11:11pm Dave Tufts said…

Mine would be similar to yours:

* Content - engaging, frequently updated content. This means both written content and visual content (i.e. photography, video)

* Clarity - links look different from regular text; easy to navigate; typographic hierarchy

* Fast - pages load quickly

Monday, Nov 24, 2008 / 11:09am Nils Menten said…

When I heard about this exchange with the prospective client, my first thought was a wiseguy answer along the lines of 'The Three Cs', meaning "Content, Content, Content", but your answer is more useful and accurate. I'd still change the sequence to Dave's though. Assuming a professionally built, well conceived and executed site as a baseline, isn't it all about the content?

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