It has been said that the appearance and functionality of a website is the virtual equivalent of a brand’s first impression. Within mere seconds, many visitors will develop opinions of a brand based on how a website looks or feels, making it vital that brands use every tip and trick possible to achieve the best website in terms of function and appearance.

Websites have certainly evolved from the early days of the internet, with more complex functions and elements required to appease various audiences. The question then becomes: which features and functions should webmasters focus on including in their brands’ web designs? We’ll assess the situation and make some recommendations for your brand’s virtual presence.

Adequate Navigation

To ensure people continue visiting and using your website, they have to be able to get from page to page easily. A functional set of navigational elements is critical in ensuring you have built a great website. Features of this include menus at the top and sides of each page, easy access to commonly-visited pages and useful search functionality built into each page of the website. You might as well be pinging noise at inanimate objects if you’ve built a website that doesn’t offer easy-to-use navigation, so be sure to incorporate this into every page.

User-Relevant Content

Operating a successful website requires offering the masses a variety of useful content offerings. This can be anything from blog posts and products to services and videos, but the need for top-tier content is crucial to retaining your audience and growing even bigger. In addition, not only must the content be high-quality, but it must also be relevant to your audience.

As such, be sure that the content you’re creating is both on-topic and presented in a fashion that resonates with your specific audience. Knowing the age, demographic background and related interests of your visitors can help further refine content to be relevant for these individuals.

Search Engine Compatibility

How easily can search engines find, crawl and index the pages of your website? If you haven’t yet asked this question, then now is the time. A great website must be fully accessible to search engines in order to generate maximum traffic and visibility. There are several actions that can be taken, such as ensuring all of your pages are index-friendly to search engines and building a site map that allows search engines to crawl every page with ease. Without these functions, you’ll basically be pinging noise at search engines (assuming they can even index your website in the first place).

Mobile-Friendly Design

Last but not least, it is imperative to remember that most internet users now use mobile devices to browse websites. For example, 55-60% of traffic originating from search engines now comes from mobile phones and similar devices. In order to have a truly great website, you must provide a useful experience to each user. As such, a mobile-friendly design is absolutely mandatory.

Mobile-friendly design will ensure that the ideal version of each page is rendered for the user based on their operating system and resolution. This also helps ensure greater user retention and increased sales from mobile users.