What Makes a Great Web Site?

What are the essential traits of great Web sites? After you visit a site and find yourself staying awhile, what makes you stay? A sense of humor helps. Flashy graphics are nice. But the fundamental traits that make a site work are more elusive. This article will break down the essential characteristics of great Web sites into some easily followed rules of thumb.

Site Guidelines

Most of these guidelines are just plain common sense, which seems to be a scarce commodity on the Web. The sexy proprietary page-layout and text markup features provided by Netscape and Explorer as they leapfrog each other have seduced many a webmaster into jazzing up their pages, only to be forced to put "you must use Netscape/Explorer to view these pages" at the bottom. This could be rephrased to say "these pages look awful without Netscape or Explorer." Stick with standard HTML (currently HTML 4) (1) and your pages will look good on all browsers that support it.

Overall, we've found that companies either get the Web or they don't. Your Web site should reflect the culture of the Web, which we call the "Gift Economy." (Witness Netscape and Microsoft.) Very few sites (5%) can charge for admission or require membership, and many people avoid sites with these barriers. Give away something valuable: information, software, advice, humor, and people will flock to your site.



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Web sites should:

Provide credible, original content in as many forms as possible

• Original content is the most important trait of a great Web site. Sites that provide only links to other sites are essentially meta-lists (although Yahoo seems to be doing well :), while sites that have some information that's useful to the user stand out and will be revisited. A recent check of webreference.com's statistics confirms this, our content providers account for 62% of WebReference.com's total impressions. Content is King.
  

Provide valuable, timely information to the user, not lots of data.

• Web sites should be updated regularly. Stale Web sites say "been there, done that." For the information to be valuable it should be well-edited. For external links include only the best sites with concise descriptions. For internal content be like a magazine editor, don't rush to publish mediocre or incomplete articles. Typos are unacceptible. [sic]
  

Original Content is the most important trait of a great Web site.

Share everything you learn

• Great Web sites share everything they learn and hear (that's relevant of course) with their users. Give behind the scenes accounts of your latest site features, go open source, start a newsletter, and you'll get more than you give.
  

Customize and target your content/site to your users. Think "one-to-one" Web sites.

Custom-tailor the information to user preferences

THAT IS WHAT WILL GET YOUR WEBSITE GOING!!