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4 Qualities Of A Great Website

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In today’s fully digital world, your website is the first touch with consumers, so it has to be aesthetically pleasing for any shot at a successful online presence. Beyond creatively pleasing, the customer experience needs to be excellent; demanding a highly functional and easy user experience, to ensure you’re building brand authority, brand trust, and search engine optimization. We know most people can recognize an attractive website by looking at it, but what factors make a website truly great? Using examples of ELMNTL clients, we will explain the 4 most important qualities below. 

1.  Incorporate Visual and Content Storytelling

Storytelling uses a narrative to create your brand message so that a customer feels connected and identifies with your brand. It’s a visual and verbal affirmation of your company’s brand, values, vision, and mission. Strategic visual elements reinforce your branding and create a narrative for readers to follow as they move down the page. Content is an essential tool to effectively communicate your message and draw people in with a story, if it’s engaging and authentic, benchmarks of successful branding.

Storytelling gives meaning to your brand beyond a singular product or service. Have a clear vision of the message that you want to tell and keep it simple. 

Does anyone really need another coffee brand? Pink Moose thinks so, and enlisted our help to do it. Our team created a one-page storytelling website for Pink Moose, a coffee shop in NYC that highlights the story behind the brand. Pink Moose engaged consumers in a digital journey beginning with their homepage that illustrated their unique brand and what differentiates them from all others, delivering high quality roasted coffee, fair-trade beans, all meaningful qualities to their target audience. Our one-page design delivers a seamless user experience, with a home page that loads fast and allows users to easily navigate between different pages. 

2. Clear Calls to Action

In our all-access world, every second counts. That’s why it’s essential every single website on the Internet should have a purpose! What’s your goal? Is it to collect emails, drive online sales, get qualified leads, or even create brand awareness? Whatever it is, the call to action is a must-have element on a webpage, signaling what to do next. Without a clear call to action, customers may not know the necessary steps to purchase a product or sign up for a newsletter, and will abandon the site without accomplishing their task or hitting your goal. A website should be built with the customer in mind at every single step. If you are an online store, you want to be sure you are making your call to action or shopping capabilities as easy to get to as possible. The easier it is for the customer to get what they are looking for, the longer they will stay. One-click access captures more sales than having to navigate through many steps.

Make sure any calls to action are actionable texts, clear and easy to follow, easy to read and digest, graphically pleasing, and lastly, short! 

The ELMNTL team created a website for the national franchise, The Halal Guys. Once you land on The Halal Guys website, visitors can immediately navigate the site to precisely what they are looking for, whether it be the closest location, ordering, catering, or more about rewards. Plus, the menu food icons call to action buttons jump right off the page, making it simple to choose and easy to navigate, great calls to action, especially when you’re hungry!

3. A Responsive Website 

What is a responsive website? A responsive website is a website created so it appears as designed no matter what device you choose, screen size, or device, it’s always consistent.  Customers use different screen sizes, platforms, and orientations, sometimes all at once! It’s a digital world, remember. You want to be sure your website shows up consistently and as intended across all mediums. That’s why you MUST have a responsive website. 

We created a website for a popular and delicious gourmet fast food restaurant, Mad Radish. The website was designed to capture the feel of the beautiful restaurant, and the mobile counterpart looks just as beautiful. The images and essential elements of the website are able to shine through across desktop, mobile, and tablet.  Rather than trying to fit the main menu on the bar image on the home screen, to maintain design integrity, the hamburger menu icon was placed in the top left of the screen in the mobile version, with mobile design elements vertically stacked, so it’s easier to scroll through. 

4. A balance of Negative Space

What is negative space? When talking about negative space on a website, it means the blank, negative or an unmarked area. It’s simply the space left between elements. 

Websites need to have negative space. Negative space allows the content to flow, gives visitors space for their eyes to rest, and provides a straightforward path to follow. Adding lots of negative space around key website elements makes pages much more digestible and prevents distracting clutter. It allows the message to be delivered prominently and efficiently. The trick is to strike the right balance of enough but not too much. 

Think of every Apple product. They all have lots of clean white space, which makes their complicated products easier to navigate.

Our team created a ‘clean’ website for  The Association of Southeast Asia (ASEAN) with absolutely no clutter and increased readability. The beautiful background images paint the picture of the beautiful ASEAN countries with enough negative space to properly digest the content about the  10 Southeast Asian Nations. All the text is perfectly balanced with negative space surrounding it. The website is breathtaking with scenic images which parallel the beauty of each of the countries.  

All GREAT websites have these 4 factors. Although these are 4 main factors, many other components make a great website. Feel free to reach out to the ELMNTL team to chat about a new website design. Our team can help breathe life into your website and tell your story with a design you’ll love. To ensure your website utilizes all key factors, it is the best it can be, or if you need to start from scratch to create a brand new website, we’ve got you. We are happy to answer questions and ready to help! 

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