OK. After all these boring things let's see the most important factors that will help you to build an effective website.

1. Appearance

Here’s the truth: your site may be the very first impression a potential customer receives of your and your business. And we all know, first impression matters! Long story short: in order to be effective, your site must be visually appealing. An attractive, engaging website is far more likely to generate a positive first impression and keep visitors on your site once they have arrived.

According to Adobe 38% of people will leave a website if they find the layout unattractive.

With that being said, I need to emphasize 3 vital design-related considerations:

Consistent, eye-catching design

Obviously, the very first step is to find or to define your own style. And there are no rules or magic formulas for this step. You’ll have to define the overall approach by yourself. As you’ve already seen on this very blog I’ve implemented a minimalist flat design with two-dimensional images, bright colors and a lot of white space. So, again, it’s completely up to you. What is important: once you have find the perfect visual style for your business, stick with and try to avoid any visual component or solution that could disrupt the already defined visual balance!

But keep in mind, regardless of the chosen style, there are a few important guidelines that must be respected:

• colors; try to find 2 or 3 primary colors that blend well and create a proper mood for your business; complementary colors create harmony and vibrant colors create emotion
• graphics; your goal is to create visual variety with appealing graphics that add meaning or context to your written content; choosing the right images can help you with brand positioning too
• text; the key is to use readable fonts and high-contrast color combinations; obviously, the most easily read combination is black text on white background
• simplicity; don’t underestimate the importance of the white spaces; uncluttered layouts allow visitors to focus on your message
• social integration; your website MUST be integrated with the most important social media networks in order to allow readers to share your content
• purpose; lastly, but not least, don’t ever forget the purpose! each page of your site should have a clear purpose in order to fulfill a specific need, and a good design always caters to that particular need; and keep in mind: users are looking for instant gratification …
  
  

Responsive design

According to Google statements, more than 50% of search queries globally now come from mobile devices.

To put it simply: having a responsive, mobile-friendly design is a must. But, what the hack is the responsive design?

It’s simple … The page responds automatically based on the screen size (and even orientation). A responsive site is designed (yes, it starts right in the design phase!) around building blocks that will break, collapse, etc under one another, shrinking or stretching the content and adjusting the image and the font sizes based on the available devices and screen sizes. The best part: there is no need for multiple different source codes or code bases. The same source code is served to all the devices and the CSS style sheets will handle the scaling …

You’ll have to decide if responsive design makes sense for your business and your current situation, but I can tell you one thing: having a responsive website is a necessity if you want to succeed.

Cross-browser compatibility

If your site will be rendered one way on Google Chrome for PC, another way on Safari for Mac, and another way on Brave or Opera Mini for Android, you won’t be able to create and sustain a perfect user experience.

In such situations the CSS rules are “translated” differently by the given browsers and the final output can be very disappointing: disrupted layouts, missing or screwed-up visual elements, embarrassing typography mistakes, etc. As a programmer I can tell you from the bottom of my heart, these cross-browser issues are one of the most annoying problems a developer can ever meet. And this is why is often neglected …

So, test out your site (every single page) on all of the modern browsers!