What Makes a Good Website

What makes a good website? "A sense of humor helps. Flashy graphics are nice. But the fundamental traits that make a site work are more elusive. Most of these guidelines are just plain common sense." (What Makes a Great Web site, 2007) Key factors of a good web site include good:

· User centric design

· Consistency

· Features

· Grouping

· Imagery

· Usability

· Navigation

· Page Layout (Understanding Websites, 2007)

Credible, original content that is updated regularly and well edited is the most important trait of a good web site. Content is key; websites that just offer links to other websites tend to be less successful while those that offer quality content and straightforward information are more successful and have higher revisiting rates. (What Makes a Great Web site, 2007)

When the internet first starting coming into our homes a big issue was response time many sites that had too many graphics, which caused the sites to load up extremely slow, or they didn't even show up at all and this turned many users away from these sites. But now that most of us have high speed internet connections the possibilities are just about endless. A great feature that many sites use to organize its images is the gallery feature.

Galleries offer an easy way to organize your images you can have one or a hundred galleries and break them up into categories and subcategories for easier organization. Galleries use thumbnails which are smaller versions of the image that are linked to the larger version of the image. By using thumbnails it reduces the overall load time of the web page. Thumbnails also save space on your webpage; instead of displaying a couple of large images, thumbnails allow you to show many images and allow the viewer to choose which image they would like to see larger. (Thumbnails, 2003)