What makes a website good.

[mrstuff68]

I am just curious what has to be on a website for people to rate it as a good/excellent site.

What they look for when they go to a website, what makes you want to come back? What makes a site appealing to you? Is it animation, graphics(please specify any old graphics or very crisp and clean graphics). Or is it the backgrounds, or the fonts, or sound, colors anything you can think of please let me know. If you have any you can say very good sites, or kick ass sites that just blow you away when you go to them, please give me the link. Your input is very important to me.

Thanks to all that reply.

[CornedBee]

A good site:
1) Provides information. This is the most important criterium for any normal page.
2) Easily provides the information. No long clicking around or anything, because that's just unnecessary delay.
3) Loads quickly, at least to the point where I can get the information.
4) Is readable. Small or weird fonts, too large fonts, bad contrast of text and background and the like destroy readability.
5) Doesn't annoy me. Sound of any kind, popups that I don't request (those are blocked anyway), unnecessarily opening new windows, annoying animations are all grounds for dismissal.
6) Work in my browser. I use Mozilla for browsing. IE-only pages seriously anger me, because they are written after a proprietary pseudo-standard set by a company I have no respect for. Since everyone wants the pages to work in their browser, you should effectively have full support for IE 5+ (Windows and Mac), Mozilla, Netscape 6+, Safari and Konqueror. Unless you're like me and make a statement of not supporting IE, but that only works if you don't NEED people to visit your site.

These are the major points. Then there are the minor points: a site should be aesthetically pleasing, which means good design. It should, if possible, not use frames because they break bookmarking and reload. It shouldn't contain any of the other functionality-impeding errors, like back-breaking-redirects.

As a final very minor point, I will always think better of a page created with CSS layout instead of table-based layout.


What means you actually use to accomplish these goals doesn't really matter.

Of course, it also depends on the kind of web page. I know of a page made for an advertising company, which is only one large flash movie and gradually loads over time. But there's always something happening, and the whole thing shows creativity, which is good for an ad company's site. Movie pages are usually done in very fancyful flash animations, for example the Harry Potter homepage. This is ok, because of what the page is. Kinda hard to explain, it's more of a gut feeling

[hellswraith]

What he said, but not all of it


CONTENT, CONTENT, CONTENT. Sure, it has to look good enough to digest the content, but that should be second.

[EZapps]

One of the things that I most appreciate about websites is easy navigation. If I can find my way around easily, I'm tickled pink. Hope this helps.

[nkad]

IE-only pages seriously anger me, because they are written after a proprietary pseudo-standard set by a company I have no respect for[/QUOTE]


Sorry but that is kina inaccurate, and here is why. Web sites are not intentionally designed as what you call, IE-only pages. A major problem with IE is it's extreamily loose tollarance level towards correctly interpreting a website. Regardless if you put in a wrong tag, miss a dbl-quote or an ending tag. IE will render the page they way it thinks it sould be rendered as if that information was still present. Another problem of IE was its lack of following W3C standards. Over the years it has gotten better at that, but still..... It could be better.

Now, another problem is with web developers. They develop and test their website with the software thats on their system (IE, Mozilla, or what have you...) and forget about making sure their webiste properly renders in other browsers. The other problem with some web developers is their lack of following W3C standards as well, such as not specifying a DTD in their <head> tag and actually following that DTD. I have also seen HTML editors not follow proper standards too. For the most part is seems to be a lack of interoperability issue with both browser and web developer.


PS: I been using FireFox lately...

[CornedBee]

Web sites are not intentionally designed as what you call, IE-only pages. A major problem with IE is it's extreamily loose tollarance level towards correctly interpreting a website. Regardless if you put in a wrong tag, miss a dbl-quote or an ending tag. IE will render the page they way it thinks it sould be rendered as if that information was still present.

Sometimes. There are some pages out there who are intentionally written after the proprietary features of IE, though one could argue that the developers of these pages aren't even aware of other browsers, it's usually small private pages this applies to.

Other browsers interpret faulty pages too, but they might interpret it differently, because the pages are ambigous. Testing is usually done on IE, so they only "work" in IE.

They develop and test their website with the software thats on their system (IE, Mozilla, or what have you...) and forget about making sure their webiste properly renders in other browsers.

Not the developers I know, but that's a special crowd.

[nkad]

I agree.

Special crowds are an exception..

[blackeyed]

In simple words the content of the website does matter but the main thing is that how easily the visitor can navigate the site.
I think the interface of the website is most important.

[abhijit]

If it does not have any popups and I will visit it everyday

[hellswraith]

The whole debate about people doing IE only sites make me laugh. I mean, when I develop my site, I could care less if people that don't use IE can use it. It is my site, I choose. You don't have to go there. People get all upset and complain, but, I just don't care about them.

Same with people that don't accept cookies. Basically I could care less about that also.

Sure, you can go on and on about how I am limiting who can see my site, but it is just that.....MY site. I can do whatever I want with it. Just because you use a browser I didn't target, doesn't mean I hate you or something, just that I could care less if you could see my site the right way.

Just my opinion on the matter. Of course if it was a primary course of income for me, then maybe my motivations would be different.

[CornedBee]

I agree with you, hellswraith, in a way. It's my site and I don't depend on people visiting it.
I follow the same policy on my site, and it so happens that IE users can't view it at all.

What irks me about IE-only development is that it's a proprietary pseudo-standard, unlike the official standard I use on my site. And it is controlled by Microsoft, and that just can't be a good thing in my book.