There are plenty of factors we should describe like design, functionality, usability, accessibility, innovation, advertising and more. You obviously want your return on investment fairly quickly and investing into the good website can consume time and money without a doubt. On this part of article we will focus on the design and usability.

The first impression is always important - visual design.

We all know first impression is crucial, if it's your new job interview or meeting with new people you want to make your impression as good as possible. It's the same with your customers visiting your website. They want to feel welcome, they should get all the information about your product or services they are looking for, and get it right. The navigation should be easy and straight forward. The subpages should load quick, as nobody wants to wait. It all takes seconds to decide whether to stay on your website or simply close the window. Does your design matches your audience? How easy you can navigate through your website? Do you have all the information on the website to satisfy your customer?
... So let's focus on the audience. Who are your potential visitors? What is their background, geographical localisation, age and mostly important what they are looking for? Based on that factors you should make sure your web design takes all that into account. Imagine a corporate website with fancy and colourful backgrounds and images all over the place and colloquial language in the content. That just doesn't sound right for that type of website. You need to focus on the person who is currently browsing your website and prepare a design to match what they are looking for. Don't forget who they are and why they are visiting your website.

Information architecture.

The most frustrating aspects of any badly design website is not being able to find what you are looking for or worse when you expect to find it but cannot. We experienced many times that people focus too much on the things that are not important for the customer. They want big and fancy logo all over the website. They are bombing a customer with information that is not something what should be exposed on the first place. Remember, the customers know what they are looking for and they want to find it quickly or they will simply click back in the browser and go to your competitor's website. When designing your navigation structure always make sure it's in the first place where you would expect it to be. Make it visible and easy to find, make it stand out. It's a good practice to have breadcrumbs telling your visitor where they currently are. If there is a lot of content on your website, why not implement a search box to simplifies the whole process of finding interesting information? If some pages are very popular then why not linking to them from the homepage. Group your content into categories so people can easily filter through it. These are the crucial things you need to focus on when preparing a design. It's also a good practice to go through your competitors websites and see how they solve the problem. Are they really popular and why? What makes them so good and what you could improve. Find the week points, have a brainstorm and come up with something innovative and creative at the same time, something better. Don't be afraid to experiment but keep your customer in mind by all the time. Very often small difference to your design can make a massive impact on the final impression.

Stay positive and the results will come quicker than you expect.

This part of article highlights only few aspects what makes a good website. But the main point is to highlight the importance of the end customer, the usability of your website and easiness of finding information, what your customers came to find. Don't be afraid to experiment with your design but keep your goals and end customer in mind at all the time. At the end of a day, you created this website for them not for your own satisfaction by putting this big and colourful logo on the half of your home page...