After working on websites long enough, you start accumulating preferences that are hard to trace back to any one rule or study. You notice which things clients routinely want that end up hurting the site. You see visitors ignore things everyone assumed would matter. You redesign something because it feels dated, then discover the old version worked better.
A lot of what makes a website good is still obvious. It should load quickly, work on a phone and give people a reasonable way to contact you. Those are baseline requirements. The more interesting decisions are usually smaller, and people who have been doing this for a while tend to have fairly strong opinions about them.
Here are some of mine.
1. Navigation Should Be Boring
I have almost never seen a website improved by renaming “Services” to something clever. “What We Do” is usually harmless, but once you get into labels like “Possibilities,” “Experience” or “Our World,” visitors have to stop and figure out what the designer meant. Services. About. Projects. Contact. There is nothing exciting about those words, which is why they work.
Navigation is one of those parts of a website that should disappear while you are using it. If I am looking for examples of your work, I should have a pretty good idea where to click before I even move the mouse. Save the personality for the page I land on.
2. The Footer Is More Important Than Most Homepages Treat It
There is a strange amount of attention paid to the first five seconds of a website and very little paid to what happens when somebody reaches the bottom. I think the footer deserves more consideration than it usually gets. Someone who has scrolled through an entire service page is not a casual visitor anymore. They may be looking for a phone number, another service, your location, a license number, a project gallery or some indication of what to do next. A footer is a good place to give them those things without forcing another hard sell. I prefer footers with some visual weight, too. They should look like the end of the site. I have never understood the fashion for making the footer almost indistinguishable from the white page above it.
3. Avenir Is Still Good
This is completely subjective, but I still like Avenir. It has enough personality to keep a site from looking generic, but it does not make the typography the first thing you notice. Source Sans is another one I rarely regret.
Freight can be beautiful when the company has enough personality to carry a more editorial typeface. Montserrat has probably suffered from its own success. I still use it occasionally, but it has appeared on so many websites that I sometimes recognize the font before I register the brand.
My stronger opinion is about body copy anyway. There is very little to be gained from making text small and light gray. It photographs nicely for a portfolio screenshot, then somebody tries to read it outside on an iPhone. Give people a comfortable font size, reasonable line length and enough contrast that reading the site does not become work.
4. There Should Be Something on the Site That a Competitor Could Not Say
One of the easiest copy tests is to remove the company name from a section and paste in the name of a competitor. If nothing else has to change, the writing is probably too generic. “Quality craftsmanship and exceptional customer service” tells me almost nothing because nobody advertises mediocre craftsmanship and indifferent customer service.
The useful material usually comes from experience. A builder may have a strong opinion about a material they stopped using years ago. A CPA knows the mistake buyers repeatedly make when acquiring a practice. A landscaper knows that homes in one particular development were built with irrigation systems that cause the same problem over and over. A manufacturer knows exactly why one tolerance or material specification matters in the field.
Those details are much more convincing than another paragraph about commitment to excellence.
5. “Learn More” Is Usually a Wasted Button
I understand why “Learn More” gets used so much. It fits almost anywhere and nobody has to think very hard about it. That is also why I rarely like it. A button is one of the few places where you get to tell somebody exactly what is on the other side of a click. “See Floor Plans,” “Compare Models,” “Meet the Therapists,” “View Recent Projects” and “Check Availability” all do that. Even something basic like “See Our Work” gives me more information. The same goes for the number of buttons. Once everything becomes a large colored call to action, the page stops having a clear call to action. Some things can still be ordinary text links, and some sections do not need a button at all.
6. Useful Information Is Allowed to Be a Little Ugly
A perfectly spaced page with beautiful photography can still be a bad website if it leaves out the information people came to find.
I have seen specification tables removed because they made a page feel too technical, service-area lists shortened because they were visually awkward, and detailed FAQs reduced to a few vague questions because the originals took up too much room. Sometimes the ugly information is the most valuable thing on the page. If somebody is comparing two products at 10:30 at night, a chart with dimensions, materials and available configurations may matter far more than the polished lifestyle photograph above it.
The web designer’s job is to make that information easier to use, not to protect the layout from it.
7. Huge Hero Photos Have Had a Very Good Run
I do not dislike full-screen hero photography. Some companies absolutely should use it. A hotel, architect, landscape designer or custom home builder may have an image good enough to deserve most of the first screen. I am less convinced that every business needs one.
There are a surprising number of homepages where the most valuable area of the site is occupied by a generic photograph and five words, and the visitor then has to scroll before finding out what the company does, where it works or why it might be worth contacting. For a lot of businesses, I would rather have a good headline, two or three sentences that say something useful, a clear next step and a photograph that supports the message without swallowing the whole screen.
A website does not become premium because the hero is 900 pixels tall.
8. Contact Forms Tend to Grow Until Somebody Stops Them
Contact forms are almost always longer in the planning meeting than they need to be. Sales wants budget. Marketing wants referral source. Operations wants project type. Somebody wants a dropdown with 14 choices because it might make sorting leads easier later. Pretty soon the visitor is filling out what feels like a mortgage application to ask for a phone call.
Every field should have a reason to be there. A contractor may need the project address. A B2B company may need the company name. There are plenty of cases where extra information genuinely helps.
But if the question can easily be asked during the first conversation, I would rather ask it then. The job of the form is to start the conversation, not finish discovery.
9. A Photograph Should Prove Something
A lot of website photography is technically good and completely uninformative. If you install pools, show the coping, decking transitions and equipment area once in a while. If you build timber frames, let me see the joinery. If you sell stone, show the surface close enough that I can understand the texture. If you are a professional-service firm, I would rather see a slightly imperfect photograph of the real people I will meet than another immaculate stock image of four strangers pointing at a laptop.
The best photographs do some of the explaining. They answer questions about scale, quality, process, materials and the people behind the company before the visitor ever thinks to ask them.
10. White Space Has Been Overprescribed
There was a very good reason designers started pushing for more white space. Older websites were crowded, everything competed for attention, and pages genuinely needed room to breathe. But white space eventually became a design virtue in its own right, and sometimes we use far too much of it.
If two things belong together, I want them to feel like they belong together. I do not need 120 pixels between every headline, paragraph, photograph and button simply because that happens to be the spacing system in the template.
On some newer websites, reading six paragraphs feels like scrolling through six separate pages. Spacing is useful because it establishes relationships, and the amount should change depending on the relationship.
11. The Order of the Page Matters More Than People Think
This is one of the places where experience tends to show. A template encourages you to think in sections: hero, introduction, benefits, testimonials, process, CTA. A good web design company should be asking a different question: what does this particular visitor need to know at this particular point?
Someone with hail damage probably cares about response time before your company history. An architect evaluating a specialty building product may want technical data near the top and testimonials much later. Someone choosing a therapist probably wants to know specialties, location, insurance and availability before reading why the practice was founded.
There is no universally correct sequence.
That is why repeating the same homepage structure across completely different industries usually produces a site that feels fine but never quite feels right. The order is part of the strategy, and sometimes the most useful thing you can do is move a section four screens higher rather than redesign it.
12. Mobile Does Not Have to Be a Smaller Desktop Site
Responsive design solved an enormous problem, but I think it also created the assumption that the mobile version should contain the same things in roughly the same order, only stacked vertically. Sometimes it should. Sometimes it should not. A person on a phone may be trying to call you from a parking lot, get directions, or compare three companies while sitting in their truck between appointments. A desktop user may be researching much more deliberately.
Those situations can justify different priorities, larger buttons, different content order or more prominent contact information. I still like checking important pages on a real phone. A narrowed browser window catches layout problems, but it does not tell you what it feels like to use the page with one thumb while somebody is talking to you.
13. My Favorite Websites Usually Have One or Two Things Nobody Requested
This can be very small. A project gallery mentions the neighborhood where the work was done. The form confirmation says someone will respond by the next business day. The 404 page gives you three useful places to go instead of making a joke about being lost in space.
Maybe the staff bios sound like they were written about actual human beings. Maybe the phone number is easy to find without being plastered across every screen. Maybe an FAQ answers the awkward question everyone asks on the phone but nobody wanted to put on the website.
Those details rarely appear in the original scope of work. Nobody sits down at the kickoff meeting and says the thing that will make this website good is a more thoughtful form-confirmation message. They tend to happen later, when somebody is paying enough attention to notice that the site would be slightly better if one little thing worked differently. After years of building and revising websites, I have come to trust those decisions more than almost any design trend. A great website usually has quite a few of them.
