What is a good website?

Most people and businesses know they need to have a website, but few can tell you what a good website does. In this post we’ll break down our definition of a good website and make it easy for you to see if your website is good.

What does “good” mean?

Good is a subjective term but it needs to be defined. At Drive Digital, we always start from a common definition that helps anchor the design process. We have seen many projects and websites get slowed down or increase in cost because definitions of success – like good – aren’t defined in the beginning. This checklist represents a key slice of our definition of good websites.

It meets a specific purpose.

Websites perform best when they are made for a specific purpose. As a tool for communication & business, when websites aren’t living to that purpose, then they aren’t good. Fortunately, this is fixable. By defining a singular purpose, a website can be turned from bad to good to great.

It communicates to its customer well.

Good websites use plain language, short and simple sentences, and clear writing as a way to simply communicate value and what customers need to do to work with a brand. We also look at how the website includes people with disabilities, as they are too often a forgotten audience when a website is made.

It has simple branding.

Good websites have simple branding to make the website an extension of their real-world brand. Good sites can use their brand to effectively expedite customer and business needs. The best ones can also do it well or better when accessing the site from a mobile device.

It represents everything you do.

A good website makes it easy for your audience & customer to see everything you do. Your website is your home base, and it should bring together everything you do: pieces of your social, your value proposition, your social, how you make business easy, your voice, and an invitation for new customers to join you. This is what I call your “total value” – if your customer can’t see your total value, your website isn’t good.

It takes care of the invisible side of digital.

Good websites take care of the invisible work of digital: site search, Google search, site navigation, and meeting legal compliance. The better ones do this in a way that makes them feel fast and fluid to your audience & customer.

It is easy to maintain and update.

This is something missed by nearly every company out there. A good website will allow you to quickly add new functions, change to market conditions, and bring new employees up to speed. This step saves a lot of time, money, and headache, and if you don’t consider this when you make your website, you’re going to pay for it in lost opportunity and time in meeting customer needs.

Its cost & ROI is easy to calculate.

A website is a tool for you, and if you’re not looking at its cost and what you’re getting out of the website, then you’re not using it to its maximum potential. While it’s almost an unspoken rule that everyone needs a website, you should also ask & understand what value your website is giving you and your customer.

Want to see if your website is good?

We can see if your site is good and how it can be great.

How can digital delight you?

Within the world of digital, most companies try to pursue delight as a way to impress customers. Few teams we have worked with can define delight, which is why we made this post.

What is delight?

Delight is a positive emotion that we all want, but is triggered in different ways for each one of us. At Drive Digital, we define delight as a joyful surprise that stops us in our tracks, in a good way.

What are examples of delight?

In the real world, delight can come from: getting to a deal you didn’t think you were going to get, some extra food, or getting work completed early and getting to go home for the day. In the digital world, delight can come from: completing something faster, when a form fills in information correctly, or you got a recommendation that was accurate. These are examples of good surprises: they make your day better, don’t cost you anything more, and put a smile on your face.

How can you make delight happen?

Here’s a few of our secrets on how we make delight happen at Drive Digital:

Understand your audience well; really well.
Know what tasks they want to complete and why. Bonus points if you know what information they need before, during, and after the task is done.
Understand the context of why your audience wants to complete those tasks and related circumstances.
Help people complete tasks quickly.
Provide valuable messaging and offers on what your audience wants to do next and how you can fulfill it.

How can we turn frustration into delight?

Frustrating story: a member of our team recently bought tickets to a concert. They bought two tickets, and it was a really large stadium, which implied traffic was going to be a mess. And trying to find a place to park was going to be a nightmare. And they also didn’t know that they didn’t need a small clear purse to hold important items when going into the stadium – they had to go back and forth from their car to remove items, which also made them almost miss the opening act.

Same story, but with delight: a team member wants to go to a concert, and when buying tickets, they can also buy a parking pass. A few weeks before the concert, the stadium send a reminder about what they bought, and also gives information about stadium rules and logistics. On the day of the concert, they receive a more compact version that gives everything they need, including timing of traffic, how to get to the parking area, the stadium rules & regulations, and concessions & souvenirs that are available at the stadium.

Why this is delight: the stadium now communicates a simple transaction (of purchasing tickets) and providing compact, pertinent information at every step of the way. Customers now have a full experience, and related, known steps already presented to them. And now the customer can focus on the right thing: getting to the stadium and having a good time, with no hiccups.

How can we enable delight digitally?

Here’s how we can make delight in this example:

Perform user research to understand what you customer wants to do and where hiccups have occurred.
Connect the ticketing system to the email system to send the appropriate information.
Connect communications along the way to your content management system to reuse content.
Connect your CRM to these systems to further personalize the information your customer receives.
Ask for feedback after the concert to see if you have missed anything or if customers have feedback.

And at Drive Digital, in our experience, while these steps are work, no stakeholder or development team has raised an objection to trying to create delight.

Want to make digital delightful?

Get in touch and we can work together to create true delight.

What makes digital different and special?

A member of our team today was asked this question. In this post, we’ll break down the major highlights of how they answered this question.

Digital is special because:

It is a functional tool.

In today’s world, people use websites & apps to perform tasks. From seeking information to making decisions to being entertained to shopping, each of these are specific tasks of humans. No other medium allows you to do all of these things at one time. As such, unlike paper or telephone, the ability to interact with something and get an immediate response makes digital special and requires a different mentality to build success.

It is a functional tool.

It is not frozen in time.

You can update your messaging and logic on your site any time you want. This quality is due to the power of code, and its ability to change. It takes minutes to change pieces of code, but can take months to change large systems. A piece of paper, a phone call, or any real world artifact cannot be treated this way. And as such, you can change digital in response to your needs or market conditions.

It has multi-faceted navigation.

Many things in the real world must be navigated in a specific way. But digital can be navigated in almost any way you want. Why? Because we have different needs & information consumption habits. This is why a navigation bar in your site, your app, and from Google is so important. You don’t know if it’s the first or last thing your audience will see before they take the step to love or hate you. To make things easy for your audience, ensure that every page is easily findable, can be found in multiple ways, and supports the context your audience need to move forward. Great navigation, when invisible to you, is a sign that the site is using this aspect of digital well.

It is robust & malleable.

Digital has the ability to communicate data with data and data about data (called metadata). This information is invisible to most humans, but is critical for Google, the guts of computers, and those with disabilities who use assistive technologies to access the internet. This data is the basis of computer logic, which allows the computer to do new things based upon new inputs, creating an infinite set of possibilities. For example, this knowledge can help you communicate the same message to hundreds of people in meaningful ways to each person – and faster than you can do manually. And digital allows you to easily swap your language at the click of a button to reach an even larger audience. That’s something print and other media can’t do without clunky workarounds or large investments.

It is multidimensional.

Digital tasks can be done across multiple channels – mobile phone, web, desktop, text, voice, AI, augmented reality, virtual reality, TV, Internet of Things – which allows you to have enriched type of experiences and tasks that can be done. It also allows you to curate information and tasks to how your user accesses your product and also to that person. With one code base you can create powerful experiences to all of these different places. No other medium today can allow you to do that.

It contains infinite possibilities.

The world of digital is constantly evolving. New technologies are coming out each year, which means there’s an unlimited potential of what can be done for your business and for humanity. If you can dream it – for example helping people with a medical diagnosis, or teaching people how to play music – there’s a way for a computer to make something that will help you achieve that end.

Need someone to show you the magic of digital?

We are happy to show what digital can do for you & your business.