If you regularly surf the web in search of particular information, services or products, you will notice that the websites are not all alike and that their quality differs, both in terms of ease of finding information, complexity to browse the site on your computer or smartphone, or even the speed of loading the pages of the site.

In this article, we will study the essential points when you want to create a quality website.

We will see that the points raised are all important and that none should be favored over the others.

Before studying these points, we remind you that a simple way to benefit from a quality website is to be accompanied by a professional such as the web & mobile design and development agency Blacksmith ;)

The user experience (or UX for User eXperience) of your site will be decisive in judging its quality.

A good UX of a responsive website or mobile application must take into account many criteria:

• the ergonomics of the website which must be successful

• a choice of pleasant colors and animations, which should not cause visual fatigue

• clear, intuitive and efficient navigation, whether on desktop, tablet or phone... a user must be able to complete a navigation journey independently, regardless of the medium on which he visits the website

• well-organized information, well structured according to its importance (game on menus, titles, and typography among others) and coherent (languages available, lexical field used, etc.) vis-à-vis your target audience!

• fluidity in the browsing experience (loading of pages, responsiveness of components, etc.)

• quality editorial content, which meets the expectations of the Internet user or mobile user visiting the site

To be sure that the user experience of your site is optimal and meets the expectations of your target, we advise you to work with a UX Designer who will be able to at least produce responsive wireframes and/or models in line with the good practices of the designs, and can even go further with UX Research methods such as creating personas and carrying out UX benchmarks or user interviews.

Remember that you only get one chance to make a good first impression and visitors to a site usually decide within the first 3 seconds of their visit whether to stay on the site or leave. leave.

This is a question posed by the owners of websites for which there has been no work on natural referencing...

A quality website must be visible on the web, with work done on:

• technical SEO, i.e. all the configurable points to help search engines index the website, such as the speed of page loading, the responsiveness of the website, the robots.txt file, the sitemap file, the presence of title, h1, meta description tags, etc.

• on-site (or on-page) SEO, or more exactly on everything that will be related to the content of the site, which includes an optimal number of characters for the titles and descriptions of the site, a good text formatting, a image optimization (size, image name, alt text)... Google wants to answer searchers' queries and questions, so a good strategy for your site can be to create content that answers these questions ( a bit like this article in this case 😉)

• off-page SEO, i.e. all the optimizations you can do but without directly affecting your website, such as external links pointing to your site, whether they come from press articles, blogs, social networks , etc.

If you want to appear on search engines, you must pay particular attention to your natural referencing strategy!

A good website must be consistent with web standards, but also comply with the regulations in force and to which the site and its creators are subject.

You must therefore be careful that your site:

• is compatible with the most popular browsers in the market you are targeting

• either responsive, i.e. compatible with the most common media or devices on the market you are targeting

• responds to web conventions and standards: if you use a component that looks like a button, a user will expect to be able to click on it; if text is underlined and blue and the mouse cursor changes when hovering over it, then the visitor will expect it to be a clickable link

• meets the legal obligations of the country in which you or your users are located. In France, it may be to have legal notices and conditions of sale and use, but also the RGPD with the need to indicate a confidentiality policy, to request authorization to install cookies, to be able to delete his account created on the site or the mobile application, etc.

Here are some final additional tips for creating a quality website:

• don't forget to challenge your website or mobile application by questioning the user experience, the content of the site... a website can be very qualitative at a given moment but no longer be relevant for a few years afterwards, hence the importance of updating it regularly and maintaining it to avoid breakdowns, for example.

• do not skimp on computer security, a good website must be secure to avoid being hacked and endangering your business, but also your customers and their data

• plan scalable hosting, which can manage traffic peaks that may occur, for example, during a TV or radio broadcast where you indicate the address of your site;)

• remember to measure what is happening on your website to understand what you need to rework! Specialized tools such as Matomo, Google Analytics, Dealfront or Hotjar will allow you to see who your visitors are, where they come from, how long they spend on the pages of your site, etc.

• maybe the site of tomorrow will be more ecological? Digital has a significant carbon footprint, and there are currently legal issues under discussion to impose the fact of indicating the eco score of websites... if you are considering a website redesign, it may be time to consider eco-designing it and minimizing its CO2 impact. We recommend testing your site on the WebsiteCarbon site and why not developing your site in JAMStack, a software architecture allowing you to develop fast, secure, scalable sites that are inexpensive to host and energy efficient ⚡️

Do you need a quality website? Contact us at partners@blacksmith.studio!