10 critical features of a good website

What makes a website good can be a really subjective thing. What works for one might be complete poison for another. Regardless, there are certain general traits that the vast majority of websites require in order to be efficient, hassle free and good at what they do.

These features can be aspects of the site that make the administrator/owner's life easy, or they can be functional design features that make life easy for users. Either way, if you haven't got them... get them!

Top website builders

Before we go through each of the ten features of a good website, it's worth quickly taking a look at the top website, online store, and blog building services available today. These website builders handle much if not all your development requirements for you.

• Pinnacle Cart
• Homestead
• Yola
• BigCommerce
• Magento - shopping cart
• Drupal
• WordPress - blogging

1. Intuitive

Regardless of what your site does, it should make it abundantly clear what a visitor can expect, and meet those expectations precisely. This can be harder to achieve than you think - generally because you understand what your website is about so it seems obvious to you. Not so for a complete stranger.

2. Easy to use

The Internet has brought a far more stringent meaning to the phrase "fool proof". With so many people of differing abilities, comprehension and willingness to learn you have to make sure that your offering is as basic as possible. For example, if there's a five step process to achieve something on your site, work hard to see if you can cut this number down to aid (not hinder) clarity.

3. Flexible

A website is perpetually a work in progress. It must adapt to changing demands and perceptions. In order to keep up it should be easy for you, the webmaster/owner, to implement changes as you see fit. This could be anything from adding new features to modifying or removing existing ones.

4. Useful

Well duh!

5. Integrated

I don't think it's entirely necessary to burst onto the scene with twitter, facebook, buzz, RSS, linkedin, blah blah all tightly woven into the fabric of your site. But I do think a website should be designed in such a way that when you choose to put in an RSS feed, or send postings to twitter, it can be accomplished quickly and easily.

6. Geared

If your website is a blog, you should be able to add posts in a snap - most likely using a WYSIWYG editor with good image handling support. If you are running a social network of some sort, your site should make managing users a cinch with both broad based and fine grained control over them. Don't waste time with a generic fit if you need a website geared for a specific role.

7. Media support

Images, audio, flash, video and who knows what other types of media are becoming more and more important. Not that long ago a blog was straight forward text; now, it's not uncommon to have blog posts accompanied by videos or slideshow presentations. Your website needs to keep with the times effortlessly.

8. High performance

You should be able to exert fairly tight control over the performance of your website. You should have a good cache regime in place, information and files should be compressed and aggregated in order to be as efficient as possible and save your server from unnecessary bandwidth and load. Remember, the faster you can serve pages the better. Oh, and Google is about to start adding load times to their index!

9. Powerful administration

This is arguably the most important aspect because it dictates how well you can stay on top of the various administrative tasks associated with operating a website. User management, content management, menus, themes, SEO, email and so on, should all be directly under your control (or the appropriate employee) and intuitive and easy to work with.

10. Traffic

"Yes", he says in a mysterious voice, "websites should have traffic". This is the without doubt hardest part to pull off. But, if you have the previous nine points in the bag, at least you can focus on this little nugget safe in the knowledge that if, as and when the traffic comes, you will be well prepared.