Each year, our team at Unique Venues takes the time to assess the websites of the venues we work with in order to determine who is doing something special. This year, there were so many amazing websites to choose from, but our team ultimately decided the venue that did it the best was Bishop’s University. We want to congratulate Bishop’s University on the award and look forward to seeing what our partner venues will come up with in 2018.
What Makes for an Effective Website?
If you are looking for a way to stand out among other college venues, having a great website is an excellent place to start. But what does it mean to have a website that will entice visitors to stay? Let’s examine this for a moment and show how Bishop’s University accomplished their objectives.
Your Page Needs to Be Technically Sound: Having a beautiful website is important. But if you have so much media and content on the homepage, it could affect the page’s load speed. This is especially the case for mobile users who may not have the most reliable connection. Bishop’s University website loads incredibly fast without sacrificing on design, making sure visitors don’t click back out of frustration.
Visitors Should Know Where to Go: When designing a website, excellent navigation is a must. If a visitor goes to your page and doesn’t know where to navigate, chances are they will just leave. Bishop’s University features top-level navigation with four tabs, including a search function, to enable visitors to access the part of the site they wish. It is also very easy to go back to the homepage from any page. Speaking of the homepage, there is interlinking throughout to guide visitors to where they need to go.
The Website Should Be an Excellent Multimodal Presentation: If a visitor goes to your site and it is just one big block of sentences on every page, this will likely be intimidating for them. People who surf the web are scanners. They’re looking to absorb key concepts and themes in seconds. They also expect multiple forms of content, including writing, pictures, and video. Bishop’s University does this very well, and it pairs various forms of content together to achieve its branding objectives.
There Should Be No Errors: Finally, we must say this because we see this all too often on websites that we otherwise generally love. If there are spelling errors, run-on sentences, or other basic grammar problems on the website, this is a major problem. Web designers and content writers working on the site should ensure all information is accurate and there are no glaring errors that may take away from the professionalism of the site. In the case of Bishop’s University, this was not a problem.