Usability, accessibility and search engine optimization are all phrases used to describe high quality web pages. There is a significant amount of overlap between them and a web page that demonstrates the characteristics of one does so for all three. The easiest way to achieve these three goals is to do so using the framework laid out in the W3C web standards.
What makes a good website?
Your website should have a goal. A measure how how “good” the website is how successful it is in meeting that goal. The goal for an e-commerce site will be very different to a fan portal, but nonetheless, “good” websites share some common characteristics. In order to meet your goal:
- Viewers have to find your site
- Viewers have to be able to view it easily
- Viewers have to be able to find what they want
- Viewers must think your website is credible
There is significant overlap between these characterstics. The things that make a site easy to find are the same ones that make it viewable, navigable and credible.
Viewers have to find your site
A website with no traffic stands little chance of aceiving its goals. Potentially the most effective way to get traffic is through Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO is the strategy involved in increasing a website’s search engine ranking (SERP), where it appears in a search engine’s results page.
Viewers have to be able to view your site easily
Many things can get in the way of someone trying to view your site for various reasons. Vewiers with vision impariments, whether blind, color blind, old or simply viewing the site on a PDA/mobile phone need well laid out web sites both in terms of organization (semanitc layout) and graphical (white space/typography). Viewers on dial-up or older computers might need sites that use little graphics or Flash. Many users for various reasons will browse your site with JavaScript turned off. All of these groups need a website that is accessible to them, and these viewers, according to some studies, can account for up to 30% of the population on the internet.
Viewers have to be able to find what they want
If a viewer can’t find what they are looking for on your website easily, chances are they will leave and go elsewhere. Your website has to be useable. Studies vary in what they say about how long someone will take to figure out your website, but the figure quoted most often is about 8 seconds. More than 83% of Internet users are likely to leave a website if they feel they can’t find what they’re looking for (source: Arthur Andersen), and 58% of visitors who experience usability problems don’t come back (source: Forrester Research).
Viewers must think your website is credible
Once they have found your site, and figured out how to use it, they need to stay on it. “When a site lacks credibility, users are unlikely to remain on the site for long. They wonít buy things, they wonít register, and they wonít return” (Stanford-Makovsky 2002).
What makes a site credible? In the same study Stanford/Makovsky found that the “Design Look” or the site’s overall design or look accounted for 46% of a site’s credibility. This included layout, typography, white space, images, color schemes, and so on. This was followed by “Information Design/Structure” (28%) or poorly the information fit together, as well as how hard it was to navigate the site to find things of interest.
Many of the factors involved in being credible are the same for being accessible and usable.
SEO, Accessibility, Usability and Web Standards
So another way of looking at what makes a good website is to describe it in new terms. A good website is:
- Search engine optimized
- Accessible
- Usable
Many of the factors that make a site better at one of these also improve it in another, there is lots of overlap between them. For example, a site that is (x)html semantically structured (the xhtml explains the document, not how it looks) will be easily read in a screen reader by someone who has poor vision. It will also be easily read by a search engine spider. Google is effectively blind in how it reads your website.
Some helpful resources:
Kevin D Burt 