What Makes a Great Web Site?

What are the essential traits of great Web sites? After you visit a site and find yourself staying for a time, what makes you stay? It really depends upon the purpose of the site. A sense of humour helps. Flashy graphics are nice. But the fundamental traits that make a site work are more elusive.

Be responsive on a 56 Kbps modem or slow broadband connection speeds use graphics sparingly to convey information. . Make your pages as easy to read as possible. Black text on a white background (as this page is set up) is the easiest to read. I've seen some nearly impossible to read pages that use backgrounds the same shade as the text (dark text on a dark background and vice versa). If you use a background, stick with the lighter shades and let the text stay black. Be interactive; good interactivity engages the user and makes your site memorable.

A common misconception companies new to the Web have is that if they put up a page, people will visit it. In order to have a popular site, you've got to offer something to the user: information, interactivity, fun, freebies, something more than an 0800 number. Original content is important. Users may come to your site once, but to keep them coming back you've got to have fresh original content.

The Web is an interactive, dynamic, and rapidly changing new communications medium that your Web site should reflect. Well-organized, edited, and timely original content set in an attractive, interactive, and consistent format are some traits of great Web sites.

Another example of simple template that can be adapted to suit your business