Determine the chief purpose of the website. Building and maintaining a website that clearly reflects what the website is for, as seen through the visitor’s eyes, is the first consideration. When a visitor comes to your site they need to know very quickly that there is a good chance there is information they may want on your site and then they stay and keep exploring further. (http://www.educationworld.com/a_tech/tech/tech014.shtml)
A second consideration is to develop the website with pleasing esthetics. All aspects of the site, from background colors and images, to text font family and colors, to graphic images, to video and animations need used relative to possible connotations of visitors. Site navigation should be simple, conventional, and obvious dividing pages into logical sections, for most websites. (https://thenextweb.com/contributors/2017/06/06/5-tips-make-website-attractive/)
Write focused page content. The primary purpose of the World Wide Web sites is to provide information. The content of websites should be useful and well written. Writing for web pages and sites is different that writing for the paper world (https://www.enchantingmarketing.com/writing-for-the-web-vs-print/). In the age of “Web 2.0” a part of writing web content also includes incorporating visitor communication systems often through allows easy links to social media associated with the purpose of the website.
There are many resources for web authoring but to see a list of common and popular authoring sites visit: https://www.best10websitebuilders.com/
When I think of a great website, one site comes to mind: www.google.ca
This site is great because:
- Visitors immediately know that the purpose of the site is to search the World Wide Web
- The site has pleasing esthetics in that it is clean and simple and easy to figure out what to do
- When a search is performed the content provides links to results, a reference to the source site, and a basic description of the site contents
The utility of the world Wide Web is relative to the user. What people want to look for is largely individualistic. What website is great is relative to what an individual wants to look for. What makes “the web” not wonderful is all the volumes of poor content and misleading information. The original purpose and history of the web is delineated and evolving (http://www.w3.org/Consortium/).