A website is a gateway for your brand and it creates the first impression of your brand in the mind of prospective customers and visitor of your website. A website must convey the message and brand identity you want to create. It must be user friendly, easy to navigate, appealing and secure. We have been developing lots of website since last 7 years and have noticed many striking difference between a real good website and a bad website and most of them are not rocket science. A poorly and not professionally done website may do more bad to your business than good. Let’s explore few of them as follows:
1. Appearance and front end
A good website must be appealing to its audience. Visitors consider a professionally done, smooth, easy to navigate website more reliable. It increases the chances of turning visitors into a prospect and it will bring down your website bounce rate sharply.
While you conceptualize your design, you must consider using colors those are soothing, not heavy on eyes.
Use maximum of 3 colors even lesser as more colors could distract the visitors. Use good combination as per your brand’s demand. Text must be easy to read along with meaningful graphics those complete your message. Using too much animation make website hard for user and using them appropriate make it more attractive.

2. Website Responsiveness
Responsiveness has become one of the key attribute of a good website. It must be mobile responsive and also browser compatible. Every user has his own preference to use browser if he finds a website not working correctly on his preferred browser, he is very unlikely to revisit it.
Smart phone revolution has given users freedom to use internet at their will, so Mobile responsiveness of websites is a “must” for a good website.

3. Content and Navigation
“Content is king” for any of the website. Content must be unique, to the point, not too much stuffing of keywords, informational and logical. Try to speak your users; do not irritate them with a strong sales pitch. Keep your paragraphs small and crisp as the user has hardly 10 seconds to scan the page.
Keep you content fresh and keep changing it over the time. No one likes to read same content time and again.

4. Ease of Navigation
Even if you have very quality content, appealing design and engaging animation but your website does not have good navigation, your are likely to have higher bounce rate as user get confused “Where to go!” syndrome. So, keep you website’s navigation as simple as possible.

5. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
For online promotion and ranking in search engines, SEO is very crucial for your website. A good website must use more of HTML less of tables, flash and image- only objects. It must have optimized meta tags, HTML site map and avoid canonical issues.
If you are planning get new website done for your business asks experts to chart out a well defined plan keeping in view above points.