A good website can’t just be all looks and no substance. We're a web design agency, so we're very much in favour of making things look nice. That said, if your website looks amazing but nobody can figure out what you do, it takes forever to load or generates absolutely nothing for your business, we can't really call that good web design.

We've been designing and building websites at MadeByShape for well over a decade, and there are certain things we look for again and again.

So, from the people who spend an unhealthy amount of time looking at websites, here's what makes a good website.

Sounds ridiculously obvious, doesn't it?

Yet we've all landed on websites, read the big fancy headline, scrolled through a couple of paragraphs and still thought:

...but what do you actually do? What service or product do you provide?

Your website isn't the place for a game of Guess Who. When somebody lands on it for the first time, they should be able to get their bearings pretty quickly. Who are you? What do you offer? Is it relevant to them? Why should they care? And where do they go next?

Now that doesn't mean cramming your entire business proposition into the first section of the homepage. It just means your messaging needs to actually say something.

For example if someone saw this headline: “empowering tomorrow through innovative solutions” there'd probably be a few raised eyebrows because... what does that actually mean? What are you empowering? What are the solutions? And, most importantly, what does your business actually do?

For the most part, saying what you actually mean will get you a lot further than trying to sound clever. Make it super easy for people to understand who you are and what you do.

And that doesn't mean your copy has to be boring. Far from it. Give it personality, make it sound like your brand and have some fun with it where it makes sense. Just don't sacrifice actually communicating what you do in the process.

That's one of the first things we look at when we're working on a website: if somebody knew absolutely nothing about this business before landing here, would they leave understanding what it does and why they should care?

If the answer's no, you've got some work to do.

Once somebody understands what you do, the next question is: can they actually find what they came for? 🤔

This is where good user experience (UX) comes in.

One of the easiest mistakes to make when planning a website is structuring it around the business rather than the people using it. Internally, you might have different departments, service categories and terminology that make perfect sense to your team, but your customers probably don't care about any of that.

They've probably arrived with something they want to do, find out or solve. Maybe they want to understand how much something costs. Compare your services. See examples of your work. Find out whether you work with businesses like theirs. Check out your testimonials. Or simply just get in touch.

A good website *should* makes those things easy to locate. That means clear navigation, dropdown menus that group related pages together, buttons and CTAs that actually tell you where they’re taking you, and important information sitting where you’d naturally expect to find it. Nobody should have to click around five different pages just to find your services, pricing or contact details.

It's why every page needs a purpose too. A service page has a very different job from a case study page. Likewise, a case study page has a completely different job from an article. And trying to make every page say and do absolutely everything usually results in a website that's harder to use.

When we're planning a website, we're thinking about the journeys real people are likely to take. What have they come here looking for? What questions are they going to have? And what are they likely to need next? You have to anticipate these needs.

It's one of the reasons why brand strategy is such a huge part of website design. Before we're playing around in Figma, we need to understand your customers – what they’re coming to the website for, what information matters to them and what they need to see before they’re ready to take the next step 🤝.

We're a web design agency after all. It'd be weird if we didn't care about the visual details when it comes to designing websites. Safe to say, we're pretty obsessed with it. We're all visual creatures and we form opinions about what we see ridiculously quickly. One study found that people can form an impression of a website's visual appeal in as little as 50 milliseconds. So, yeah... first impressions really do count.

There's also a relationship between how a website looks and how credible it feels. In Stanford research into website credibility, 46.1% of credibility-related comments referenced the site's visual design, including things like the layout, typography, font size and colour. We want the websites we design to look amazing. We want great typography, strong imagery, interesting layouts, thoughtful movement and those little details that make you want to keep scrolling. But there's a difference between designing something that looks unreal and designing something complicated purely for the sake of looking cool.

We've seen plenty of websites where you land on the homepage and suddenly you're dragging things sideways, chasing your cursor around the screen and trying to work out whether that floating blob is actually a button. Very cool. But if the user has no idea where the contact page is, what’s the point?

That's where we'll happily take a step back and ask the boring-but-important question: does this actually make the website better?

Every design decision needs some thought behind it. If we introduce an animation, interaction or unusual layout, we're thinking about what it adds to the experience. Does it help communicate something? Draw attention somewhere important? Add personality? Make the brand more memorable? Or is it just there because we can do it?

If something looks impressive but makes the website harder to understand or use, we'll choose the user every time. That’s not to say that we play it safe as a web design agency because we really don’t. We love big typography. Bold colour. Beautiful imagery. Clever interactions. Unexpected layouts. Movement. Personality. All the good stuff. Good web design isn't about choosing between looking amazing and being easy to use. The best websites do both.

That's always what we're aiming for at Shape: websites we're ridiculously proud to look at, but that still feel completely seamless for the people actually using them. So yeah, we’ll obsess over the visuals all day long; we just won't let them get in your customers' way. 

Take a look at how we show a bit of personality on our own website👇.

This is a big one for us.

Go and open five websites from the same industry in separate tabs.

There's a decent chance you'll see the same colours, same stock photography, same layouts and maybe even similar headlines.

Templates aren't inherently bad. They can be a perfectly sensible option if you're working with a small budget and simply need something professional online quickly. But there comes a point where fitting neatly into your category starts making you invisible within it.

When we're designing a bespoke website, we're not looking at competitors and thinking, “Oooh, that's nice. Let's do one of those.”

We're looking for patterns.

• What's everyone doing?

• What visual conventions have become predictable?

• What opportunities are there to do something genuinely different but at the same time will make sense for your brand?

Your website should feel like your business. Your brand, your personality, your proposition and your way of communicating. Not someone else's brand.

A good website shouldn't feel like the distant cousin of the rest of your brand.

If someone has seen you on Instagram, received an email from you and then landed on your website, it should all feel connected.

That means consistency across your:

• colours

• typography

• imagery

• graphics

• tone of voice

• messaging

• overall personality

Notice we said consistency. That doesn't mean everything needs to look exactly the same everywhere. There's a difference. Your brand needs enough of a system behind it that you can adapt it to different places while still being recognisable, and your website is where that really gets put to the test.

When we work across branding and web design together, we're thinking about how that identity actually behaves digitally. How does the typography work across a huge homepage heading and a tiny mobile screen? How does the tone of voice translate into buttons and calls to action? How can graphic elements move or respond?

A logo is one singular asset while the brand is the whole experience. In our honest opinion, we think your website should feel like one of the fullest expressions of your brand. 

We've all used a website where finding one basic bit of information somehow turns into a full-scale investigation.

• Click.

• Back.

• Different menu.

• Back again.

• Check the footer.

• Give up 👋

Good navigation shouldn't really make you think about navigation at all. It shouldn’t be complicated.

The main menu should prioritise the pages people actually need, labels should make sense, and important information shouldn't be buried underneath six unnecessary clicks.

And please don't replace ‘Contact’ in your navigation with something like ‘Let's Make Magic’ and expect people to instinctively know that's where they need to click to get in touch.

There's room to be creative, of course, but navigation isn't always the place for it.

For larger websites, things like mega menus, breadcrumbs, search functionality and related content can make a huge difference. Internal linking matters here too. If somebody finishes reading one page and their natural next question is answered somewhere else on the site, take them there.

We don't want dead ends.

A good user journey should feel obvious without feeling restrictive. You're helping people move through the website.

We design websites, but we'll happily admit that design can't rescue rubbish content.

A beautiful service page filled with vague corporate waffle is still a vague service page filled with corporate waffle.

Good website content should actually help people. It might explain something. Answer a question. Remove a concern. Demonstrate your expertise. Show somebody how you've solved a similar problem. Or give them the information they need to make a decision. And different visitors will need different things.

Someone reading their first article about a problem probably isn't ready for a massive BOOK A CALL NOW!!! CTA button every twelve seconds. Instead, they might need to learn first.

That's why a good website should have content covering different stages of the customer journey.

Your blog or insights can answer questions and bring people into the website through search. Case studies can show what you're capable of. Service pages can explain exactly how you help. FAQs can remove those little niggling doubts standing between somebody and an enquiry.

Your website has a job to do for the business. That might be generating enquiries, selling products, booking appointments, getting demo requests, encouraging downloads or something completely different.

Whatever that goal is, people need an obvious way of getting there.

That's where calls to action come in.

👉 Get in touch.
👉 Book a demo.
👉 Request a quote.
👉 View our work.
👉 About Us.
👉 Buy now.
👉 Let’s talk.

Good CTAs tell people what happens next. They stand out visually, appear at sensible points in the journey and match where that person is likely to be in their decision-making process.

We don't need seventeen different buttons fighting for attention. We also don't want to make the actual conversion unnecessarily painful.

If your enquiry form is asking for their age, hobbies, job title and loads of other information you don't actually need, you're just giving people more reasons to abandon it. Keep it simple. Ask for what you genuinely need and nothing more. Remove any friction and make the important actions super easy to follow through. Take some inspiration from us, here's a snippet of what our project planner looks like. It works for us 🤝.

You know you're good at what you do. Your mum probably knows you're good at what you do. But that random person who's just landed on your website from Google doesn't. They need proof.

Testimonials, reviews, case studies, awards, accreditations, client logos and genuine examples of your work can all help reassure somebody that you're not just saying you're brilliant because you’re biased.

If you take a look at our Shape website , you’ll see what we mean. The social proof is there and it naturally increases customer trust. The likes of case studies are particularly great because they give any claims some context. Don't just tell someone you increased sales, improved an experience or transformed a brand. Show them what you did.

Trust also comes from smaller things: clear contact information, an About page with actual humans on it and up-to-date content. All pretty simple yet all surprisingly easy to overlook.

Desktop. Laptop. Tablet. Phone. Monitors … Your website needs to work across all platforms.

Which brings us onto the point that at Sape, we actually design desktop-first. For the reason being that it gives our web designers the biggest canvas to establish the full creative direction of any project, with no limitations. Desktop-first doesn't mean desktop-only by any means. 

Our developers build websites responsively so layouts adapt naturally across different screen sizes. That means we're considering what happens to typography, imagery, navigation, spacing, interactions and content as the available space changes.

Mobile shouldn't feel like somebody designed a lovely desktop website and then squashed it until it technically fitted onto an iPhone. Buttons need to be tappable. Text needs to be readable. Navigation needs to make sense. Content shouldn't mysteriously disappear because nobody could figure out where to put it.

We test this stuff. A lot. Responsive design is all part of building a website properly, and we've attached a video below to show you exactly what we mean by this approach 👇.

The stuff happening behind the scenes matters just as much as the stuff you can see.

Speed

Nobody wants to sit staring at a loading spinner while your 14MB hero video slowly makes its grand entrance.

Images and media need optimising. Code needs to be considered. Web hosting matters. Unnecessary scripts shouldn't be piling up in the background.

Web performance isn't something you think about once five minutes before launch either. It needs monitoring as the website grows.

Accessibility

Your website also needs to work for people with different access needs.

That means thinking about things like colour contrast, heading structure, alt text, keyboard navigation, focus states, readable typography, captions and the size of interactive elements.

Accessibility shouldn't be something bolted onto a finished design because somebody suddenly remembered it exists. It should be considered throughout design and development. A lot of accessible web design practices simply make websites nicer for everyone to use.

Security

Then there's security.

HTTPS, sensible permissions, secure web hosting, strong passwords, backups, updates and proper CMS maintenance aren't exactly the sexy bits of web design.

Still quite important when someone is trusting your website with their personal information, though.

Our CMS of choice is Craft CMS, and part of building professional websites is making sure clients have a platform that's properly implemented and can be maintained over time.

SEO

Finally, people need to find the thing.

SEO shouldn't suddenly appear at the end of a web project when somebody asks, “Oh yeah, what about Google?”

Site architecture, content, headings, URLs, internal links, metadata, performance, crawlability and technical foundations can all affect how easily search engines understand a website.

We offer organic SEO at Shape too, so we're naturally thinking about the relationship between the website we're building and how people are actually going to discover it.

This might be the most overlooked one. A website isn't finished when it goes live.

Launch day is exciting. Everyone celebrates. Maybe there's a beer involved. Lovely stuff. But now you get to see what people actually do with it.

Analytics can show where people enter and leave. Heatmaps can help you understand what they're interacting with. Search data can show what people are looking for. Enquiries can reveal questions the content isn't answering. User feedback might highlight something that seemed really obvious to everyone involved in the project but apparently isn't obvious at all.

That's normal, good websites should evolve! 

You might improve a CTA because people aren't clicking it. Rewrite a service page because users keep asking the same question. Add functionality because customers need it. Build new landing pages around search demand. Update case studies as the business grows.

And then there's the boring-but-important maintenance: checking links, updating content, keeping software secure and making sure everything continues working as it should. We don't see a website as something you launch and forget about for five years until everyone collectively decides it looks a bit old.

It's a working part of your business so you have to treat it like one.