Whether you are working in an agency or are client-side, you might be trying to figure out what makes a truly amazing website. There is no simple answer to this as everyone has their own preferences when it comes to design and usability, but there are certainly some aspects that can make one website better than another.

This blog post will take you through some of these features, which you might want to think about incorporating into your own website and strategy in the coming weeks and months.

Page Structure

The most important thing to remember when it comes to website design is the purpose of having one in the first place: to encourage people to visit your small business. It’s essential to make the website easy to navigate.

The first thing on the list is the structure of the website, which basically requires you to think about how many clicks it takes to reach certain pages. Sub-menus can be effective for categorization purposes, but you don’t really want your visitors to have to click more than three times before they find what they are looking for. This is the case whether you have an e-commerce store or are listing information about local services.

Web Form Fields

Another common mistake on websites comes from the coding of web forms. On the face of it, these forms look fairly simple – but if they go wrong it can cause a nightmare for prospective customers. Asterisks often mark “essential” data fields, but if these are incorrectly used, people can struggle to enter everything the form needs to deliver the next stage or successful submission. Do tests on all web forms to make sure they are working.

Broken Links

Links are another common problem on websites. A broken link occurs when one page links to another, and the second page has been changed or deleted. This can make it hard for customers to find what they were originally looking for, and could lead them to going back to a search engine to see something on your competitor’s website instead. Check what type of CMS your company uses to see whether there is a better way of linking to pages. Some of them will automatically update links so they don’t break when changed; you can read more about CMS technology on the Overthrow Digital website.

Design for Mobile

The use of mobile devices is continuing to be on the rise, so make sure you don’t get left behind. There are a number of ways that you can improve a website for mobile use, whether you have a special mobile website or choose to use responsive / adaptive technology. The idea behind this is that your website will change shape and functionality depending on the device it is being used on. This means you only need one website and it will work on PCs, tablets and smartphones.

Call to Action

Of course there are many other things that can make a website a pleasure to use, but from a business perspective, you just want as many sales or leads as possible. This means you need to get certain areas to stand out on the page; one of these will be the “call to action” – which is the next step that people take in the sales process. If you make sure this is bold, people won’t miss it when they are browsing.