As the title suggests, your website does not need the latest bells and whistles. In fact, a lot of the very fancy designs we see become useless after the first few views. I remember in the late 90s, maybe the early 2000s, when a revamped website showed the cursor not as a standard arrow, but a crosshair with very feint vertical and horizontal lines that spanned the height and width of the page. While I marvelled at the JavaScript that was used to accomplish this, the feint lines across the page very soon became a distraction. Maybe this helps with GIS applications to pinpoint coordinates, but it has no value on a website.

Design vs. Performance

Think of your website in the way you think of your car. The exterior may look very impressive and have a design no other car on the market has, but it becomes meaningless if the performance of the car does not match the beautiful shell. Unfortunately, many “web designers” focus so much on what the site looks like, that they ignore those aspects the site needs to perform well. Why did I use quotes around “web designers”? Simply because that is what many are. They are excellent at exterior design, but often lack the programming skills that are vital to the performance of the website.

The SEO Reality Check

A simple SEO test proves this. I have seen some really impressive looking sites, only to test them with a SEO or code tester and see results of 50% or lower, with very bad meta information scores. No proper headings in the right order; repeated hyperlinks; meta information missing – these all point to one thing: a site put together with typical CMS platforms such as WordPress. With these you do not see the code; you just drag and drop, copy and paste. The template may look good, but that is about it. You can “design” a site with no programming skills. This does not make you a web developer.

Boring But Effective

I watched a video by an experienced developer the other day and he said that it is perfectly OK to have a boring website. What he meant was not that it must look like a legal document drafted with a word processor but rather that the basics should be used to create a website that will be effective. The underlying code is the engine that drives that website, much like your car’s engine, and this is what brings the performance. Here are some pointers for web developers and clients alike.

1. Navigation – stop trying to be different. Navigation items are at the top of the page, usually towards the right of the layout. This is where people expect to find clickable content. It is like an operating system, whether Windows, Linux, or macOS. You expect to find the File menu at the top left of the screen, the first item; nowhere else. It’s muscle memory that makes you automatically move your cursor to the top left, nowhere else. Do it differently, and you drive away customers.

2. Hero section, above the fold – state why the website exists. You must have a decent but short sentence that describes the website’s purpose and how it benefits you. If this part of the site is written correctly and you have a standout CTA, you have captured the prospective client. Here you may have a screen-wide banner that acts like a carousel. Most people expect something like this. However, beware of carousel actions that cause motion sickness.

3. Main page content, below the fold – here you will add more content, but for each section decide if it really has a purpose here. This area is secondary to the hero section and must not state anything new but rather underline what was said in the hero section. If it does not add value, remove it.

4. Footer – the most overlooked part of your website is the bottom end of the page. It essentially carries the weight of the information above it. Just look at some decent websites and you will see that they all use the same type of content in their footers. They are not trying to be radical. They just give information we expect to find.

5. Secondary content pages – nowadays we find that good web developers will use sections on the main page to show secondary page content instead of using secondary pages. Whether you use it depends on how much information the secondary page needs to hold.

6. Word count – be careful how you write. If the same message can be conveyed in ten words, do not use more. Learn to use language effectively. Good web developers are either good writers themselves, or they have access to the services of good writers.

The Coffee Table Book Test

Go to your local bookstore and look at a few books. They all look basically the same – front and back cover, foreword, index (depending on the content), chapters, and pages reading left to right, top to bottom. The ones that are actually read most are those that have a great story to tell without an abundance of graphics. Designer coffee table books on the other hand are expensive, use glossy paper, beautiful photographs, and great covers, but they are just ornamental items in your living room, adding no real value.

How much value does your existing website add to your business? Maybe it is time you reconsider what you have.