I was thinking about websites and what makes them tick. There are ten major aspects of a website, and they’re all pretty interconnected. Like a machine or an organism, the entire thing won’t function well or properly without most or all of these elements. I will discuss each aspect in no particular order – remember, these are all vital to the process.

Content

Content is what makes or breaks a website. You can have the most beautiful, functional website in the world, but without content, you pretty dead in the water. Whether your content is interactive videos and games to keep visitors engaged or informative copy, content is vital. This may seem obvious, but a lot of my clients don’t consider the importance of their content. The fact is that for many businesses, the first interaction a customer has with them is on their website. What you present to your visitor is vitally important, every time. This is vital for advertising, rank and SEO.

Relevance

If the content is irrelevant to the visitor’s needs and purpose in visiting your site, it’s useless – and may actually be damaging. When users type words into a search engine and get results that seemingly relate to that search, they expect the resultant website to fulfill their needs. Whether they’re looking for information, a product or service, if your website fails to give it to them, they’ll be frustrated and your rank will suffer.

Effectiveness

How often do visitors do what we want them to do? If we understand why they’re visiting our site and we’re attempting to meet their needs (relevance), but they can’t achieve that goal because the site is not well organized or functional, we have a big problem. How simple do we make it for the visitor to contact us, purchase goods or click on ads? The user’s goal is important, but we can’t forget our own goals in the process.

Monetary Value

How valuable is the website, in dollars? What revenue does it bring in? Has it surpassed expectations, or failed to meet them? Based on data we get through analytics, we can apply the data to maximize leads and revenue. Remember, leads are money.

Rank

Forgetting buzzwords and industry lingo for a minute, what’s the primary purpose in having a website? Being found by people who will enjoy our site, buy our products, support our advertisers, or become service customers – right? The point of having any website is to be found by other people – people who are relevant to us for some reason. Whether we want them to like us and pay attention to us (Myspace, bloggers, musicians, etc.), buy our products, engage us for services, or enjoy our content and click on the related ads we feature, we want them to find us. In order for them to find us, we need to play ball and build a good website that will gain rank, using analytics.

Analytics

This is such a popular buzz-word, and so many people are already using analytics without realizing it or are intimidated by the charts and graphs (and, oh god, Math), associated with it. Instead of being intimidated by analytics, let’s think of analytics as a catch all term for the data we want in order to form conclusions about our visitors, our website, and the effectiveness of what we do. Analytics report everything from how many people came to the site, how many people completed a transaction and how they got there. Analytics also deals with effectiveness. The data gained from testing which design/copy/structure is more effective is also analytics. Really, really powerful and cool analytics.

Application of Data

This is how we interpret the data gained from analytics. It isn’t always easy, or obvious. Interpretation of data requires some pretty snappy analytical thinking. It is vital to be able to think really out of the box to figure out why people do what they do, and how you can better engage them. But analysts of this kind of data aren’t magical or psychic (okay, maybe a little bit). Using more analytics to gain a bit of qualitative data. This may seem weird, since analytics primarily deals with numbers and pure, chartable data. Qualitative data is still a big part of analytics, and it requires just as much analytical thinking to get some really useful answers – and apply them. Think surveys.

Organization (UI)

This applies to both front-end and back-end interface. Whether you’re using a CMS or hand coding the entire site, you need to be organized. The design must be navigable by visitors. At the same time, you need to be able to modify the site quickly and effectively, without having to undergo a huge task every time you need to make a change, either to the content or the design of the site.

Function

It just has to work. Cross browser, cross platform, it has to work. No buggy scripts, no weird errors, no inexplicably blank pages. W3C validated.

Design

Last, but certainly not least, the design is the look and feel of your site. It conveys a message through color, graphics and composition. All the analytics people just zonked out, but this stuff has a method and a system, too. Understanding the kinds of people who will be using the site will help determine how the site should be designed. How should it appeal to them? What will engage them? Content is only half the battle.

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