The Key to Quality Website Functionality
If you want visitors to your website to have a good experience, then functionality is crucial.
If you want visitors to your website to have a good experience, then functionality is crucial. Looking pretty is only half of website design – the other half is making it work properly. We’re far away from the simplistic websites of the 1990s and now internet users have certain standards they expect to see on the web. This means that even if you’re not a tech-oriented company, you will still lose competition to businesses that have more intuitive websites than your own. Let’s explore what makes elements take website functionality to the next level.
Standards
If you haven’t heard of W3C standards, then now’s the time to get acquainted because they’re an important part of standardising web development for everyone. Following these guidelines will not only improve your ranking in search engines, but they’ll also make your website more easily accessible across different platforms.
W3C stands for World Wide Web Consortium, and it was founded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Its implementation is important, since it allows everything from old desktops, to mobile phones to smart TVs to properly view any website that conforms to its guidelines. This is the base-line of functionality, and perhaps the most important to the user experience.
Aligning with Policies
You need to be mindful of the laws and regulations surrounding data and privacy for your website. Cookies help keep track of your visitors’ preferences, but if you want to implement you need to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to consent to being tracked by them. This, among other privacy considerations, has been enforced by the EU’s General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), since 2018.
Despite the UK having left, it still uses this same model, so it’s important to take GDPR into account in the design of your website. Keeping track of your visitors can be a useful way of understanding your audience and their preferences, but you need to take consideration of their privacy.
Integration
Integrations are a great way to customise your website with useful tools and applications. Implementing Google fonts, for example, offers you a much greater variety of typefaces than you would have otherwise. Chatbots, too, are a great way to converse with your website’s visitors and create a welcoming environment.
If you’re using your website as an ecommerce storefront, then integrations are incredibly useful. WooCommerce and Shopify are some of the most common options, as they provide all the functionality you need in a user friendly way. For marketing, Mailchimp is a great way to drive email traffic through to your website, and integrating can streamline the process while offering insightful stats to work from.
Accessibility
Accessibility means making sure that, no matter a persons’ unique circumstances, everyone can use your website without issue. We could write a whole other blog about the intricacies of accessible web design, but here we’ll just go over some basics. It’s a helpful practice to ensure the colours you use will remain distinctive even if viewed by someone with colour blindness. Likewise, it’s important that you include proper alt-text for the images you use, so people with visual impairments can understand what they are.
If someone with a visual impairment needs to navigate a website, they will use screen readers, so constructing a website in a way that allows them to read it logically is integral to their navigation. It’s not just visual design that ought to take accessibility into account, though. Not every visitor will be able to use a mouse, so it’s essential that a website can be easily navigated with just a keyboard as well.
Websites can be complicated, but hopefully this helps you get to grips with making sure yours is functional. If you need a website designed for you that will offer quality functionality, then get in touch! We’d love to help.
