How To Make a Website Wonderful

There is so much that goes into making an effective, successful, and easy to navigate website. Anyone that has access to the World Wide Web has stumbled upon websites that have been wonderful to use, and that we therefore continue to go back to and visit, and we have found websites that are highly irritating and don't make any kind of sense. The website we like we visit again, and the ones that are lacking are ones we avoid by all costs. So, what makes an effective and enjoyable website??

A good place to start when designing or making a website would be to really know your audience. Know the people you are tying to target and tailor your website to what those people want. Redish essentially states that there are seven characteristics for each audience:

1. Key phrases or quotes
2. Experiences, expertise
3. Emotions
4. Values
5. Technology
6. Social and cultural environments
7. Demographics

All of these characteristic help a creator to better understand their audience, and therefore, create a website that users will respond positively towards.

Another very critical element of having a successful webpage is to have a very organized and efficient homepage. A website's homepage is the first thing that a viewer will see when going to the website, and if a homepage isn't easy to use and clearly laid out, people will leave the website and find somewhere else to get the information they are seeing. Here are two examples of home pages, one is good and one is bad:

Good Homepage

Bad Homepage

This J. Crew homepage is very clean, organized, and has a good use of color that enhances the webpage and does not detract from the material or aesthetic. This example of a bad homepage is for some sort of company where you can buy Hawaiian goods. The homepage is so cluttered that the viewer can barely find what exactly the website has to offer. Someone who is looking to buy something off the internet is much more likely to buy something from a company with a homepage like the J. Crew page, not the webpage like the Hawaiian goods page.