10 Steps to Create a High-Quality Website

Published on May 10, 2007 (updated Feb 5, 2024), filed under development, design (feed). (Share this on Mastodon or Bluesky?)

This and many other posts are also available as a pretty, well-behaved ebook: On Web Development. And speaking of which, here’s a short treatise just about managing the quality of websites: The Little Book of Website Quality Control (updated).

A quality website doesn’t fall from the sky, and it’s impossible to create in a few fast clicks. When setting up a website, one needs goals, content, structure, design, programming, and maintenance. What one needs is expertise. This article outlines—without attempting to be complete—the 10 most important steps to creating a good website. A checklist to be shared.

This is a translation of my article “10 Schritte zur hochwertigen Website”, kindly provided by Greg and Esther Scowen. Thank you!

Contents

1. Commitment
2. Planning
3. Information Architecture
4. Design
5. Programming
6. Quality Assurance
7. Public Relations
8. Success Control
9. Maintenance
10. Quality Assurance

1. Commitment

If you don’t sincerely want to create a website and don’t intend to maintain it: Don’t even start.

A high-quality website requires a lot of commitment and effort. Good content requires a lot of commitment and effort. Your users and visitors demand commitment and effort. A website can be compared to a pet—think about whether you really want one before you get one. (But you’re right, it’s much worse to treat pets badly.)

2. Planning

You have decided that you want a website and that this website should meet an acceptable standard. What you need to do now is plan:

• What is the goal of your website?
• What is the target audience of your website?
• What content do you want to provide?
• Which metrics will you use to determine your success? (Define your key performance indicators.)

If you’re unsure about how to answer these questions, if you’re in doubt or fail to find an answer to one of the questions, take a break. Or consult others to help you with your decisions. Your website will wait.

3. Information Architecture

After the planning phase has been completed, don’t immediately start designing and implementing: First, you need to create, test, and verify the structure and architecture of your website. To do this, read a good book about information architecture, look at a few heuristics and have 15 users do card-sorting. Even at this early stage, keep an eye on localization and internationalization. Document the structure you have identified and validate it—by testing it while you’re designing the website.

4. Design

Hooray, Design. Important:

Design is a set of fields for problem-solving that uses user-centric approaches to understand user needs (as well as business, economic, environmental, social, and other requirements) to create successful solutions that solve real problems. Design is often used as a process to create real change within a system or market. Too often, Design is defined only as visual problem solving or communication because of the predominance of graphic designers. In other fields and contexts, Design might only refer to Fashion Design or Interior Design. However, a recognition of the similarities between all design disciplines shows that the larger definition for Design operates at a higher level and across many media.

—Nathan Shedroff: An Evolving Glossary of Experience Design (2005).

Consider these additional points before you start the design process:

• It’s good to have a look at a few principles, whether specific ones by Tufte or Tognazzini or general ones like the golden ratio or wabi-sabi.
• It’s essential to keep accessibility in mind, even during the design phase. It’s easy to address color blindness, photosensitive epilepsy, or sufficient contrast during this stage.
• Test your drafts (don’t wait until the final version). Carry out tests, whether with five users, with more than five because that’s not enough, with n users, just as long as it’s cheap, or with none because you place your trust in experts. Apply the basic rules of usability.

Be creative, but not without restraint.

5. Programming

After completing the design process, which should have led to an appealing, working design, you can start the implementation. (It’s possible, however, that you already start this at an earlier stage.) In addition to hosting, you need to consider the following points:

• Choose a suitable document type for your documents. If in doubt, get inspiration from Jeffrey Zeldman or Eric Meyer. If this doesn’t help you—just pick any valid document type. [Today, just use <!DOCTYPE html>.]
• Use HTML elements according to their meaning.
• Write structured code and adopt coding guidelines. This is particularly important if more than one person is working on the project.
• Validate. Everything. Consider it a taboo to publish documents and style sheets that aren’t valid.
• Whatever you do, always keep accessibility in mind. Accessibility heuristics can be useful, though they don’t cover everything.

6. Quality Assurance

After having worked out an elaborate, high-quality information website on the basis of the aforementioned points, you should still absolutely and definitely carry out quality assurance (QA). The launch of your website should depend on it. It may be possible to launch your website immediately after having carried out QA, but that’s likely only to work if you have focused on quality from the beginning.

Control and optimize the following:

• Technical validity and conformance of all resources.
• Accessibility, ideally with the help of real users, but automated tests can be useful as well.
• Links. Linkrot is not fashionable.
• Load time.
• Just about everything. Your website should stand for great quality and a great user experience. Make sure that’s the case.

7. Public Relations

Market your website without feeling guilty. Your HTML should already be suitable for search engines (semantics and accessibility). Use a moderate link strategy from this point on and perform conventional Public Relations (PR). I know, this is easy to be said, but it has to be done. Furthermore, don’t get upset if your website doesn’t have great success from the very beginning, with traffic exploding within a brief time—plan for the long run.

8. Success Control

Make sure that the “key performance indicators” (KPI) you determined at the beginning are measured. If your statistics don’t give you these numbers, make sure they do. There are some useful statistics tools: A few good ones are free of charge (Google Analytics), some are good and inexpensive (Mint), and others are good and expensive (WebSideStory). Use metrics to evaluate the development and the success of your website.

This tip won’t be of much use if you have not had a good look at web analytics. It’s time to do this now.

9. Maintenance

Maintain your website. Update your website. Look after your website. Add new content on a regular basis. Furthermore, review old content. You need to proofread new and old content. Never cease to question your site. At the end of the day, it’s once more all about…

10. Quality Assurance

That’s right, quality assurance is a process. Keep validating, checking, and testing your documents, contents, and design… again and again. Enjoy your good website!

About Me

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m a web developer, manager, and author. I’ve worked as a technical lead and engineering manager for small and large enterprises, I’m an occasional contributor to web standards (like HTML, CSS, WCAG), and I write and review books for O’Reilly and Frontend Dogma.

I love trying things, not only in web development and engineering management, but also in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my experiences and views. (I value you being critical, interpreting charitably, and giving feedback.)