What Makes an Effective Website in 2023?

Want the short answer or the long one? The short answer is 42 Studio 😉. The long answer is how we do it, and we’ve included our process as well as the “dos and do nots” in the article that follows. 

An effective website starts with defining its purpose. The purpose is dictated by the target audience(s) and their needs. Is the website designed for users, developers, investors, gamers, or businesses? Maybe it’s targeting a few of the above. An effective website is a clear one: if you don’t get your messages across to the right people, the site is not doing its job. 

Multiple Audiences

Many projects cater to multiple audiences, and creating one website for all may not be the best option. To avoid confusion and lack of consistency, break up your website into mini-sites, all connected by a short intro page. From the intro, visitors easily navigate to their desired destination and get the information they need. To clarify, if the intro site is brand.io,  the intro will lead to one of two pages: brand.io/develop for developers and brand.io/trade for traders. Each of these has its own site menu and CTA in order to provide only the most relevant information and avoid crossover confusion.

Dividing your site into directed mini-sites is also great if you want to run a marketing campaign targeting one of your audiences: simply use the relevant mini-site as your landing page, and you’re done. 

Build a Sitemap

The first active step to building your effective website is to establish the layout of the site, primary CTA buttons, and menu contents. Your sitemap is the blueprint for everyone to work from and follow in order to synchronize all work on the site and ensure that the end result matches your initial expectations.

Without a sitemap, your key messaging and desired structure will likely get lost, and the finished site will not be effective at capturing your audience’s attention.  

Attention Spans in 2023

The key to websites in 2023 is efficiency. 

Visitors will spend on average a total of 45-53 seconds scanning your site. This means you need to grab their attention from the get-go and send messages at the speed of light. Your website copy and designs need to be clean, simple, and on-point. Integrating video content is a good idea. 

You may be tempted to go overboard with your designs in order to capture longer attention spans, but this will ultimately work against you. Over-the-top designs distract from your messaging and confuse visitors. The result? Your message doesn’t get delivered, and even if they do spend a few extra moments on your site, you won’t get more out of their time.

Phased Approach

If your dream website is a whopper with 20 full-fledged pages you might consider breaking your pages into phases. In phase 1 you perfect and release the most important pages. When that’s all complete, you get to work on phase 2, etcetera, etcetera. This way your site goes live much faster, and you’re focused and prioritized to invest all of your resources in the most important pages instead of dividing resources and ending up with sub-par results. 

A phased approach is also beneficial as it lets you stay organized and realistic with your timeline and expectations. 

Develop for Speed and Responsiveness

This is the generation of instant gratification. If something doesn’t work well and fast, it gets thrown in the garbage. Don’t throw away your efforts and brand value by skimping on development. 

Invest proper resources into quality web development.  If we mentioned attention spans, a slow site is detrimental to its effectiveness: you’ll need to factor in loading times into the time spent by visitors on your site, and bugs and inconveniences will surely chase them away and may even cause them to lose confidence in your brand.

Be sure not to overcrowd your site with heavy design elements that will slow it down (yet another reason not to overdo the design).  And consider investing in Google’s Core Web Vitals to optimize page loading times, enhance responsiveness, and reduce bounce rates. Everything should load fast and smoothly on 80% of smartphones.

Go Mobile-First

Build for mobile. Remember: our 2023 generation lives on their smartphones, not next to a computer.  An effective website caters to the platforms that most visitors will be on and builds for their needs. 

Final thoughts

An effective website is not complicated or overdone. It’s authentic, clean, and clear. It meets target audiences where they are and speaks to them directly in their terms. An effective website is professional and breeds trust with carefully placed content and designs to deliver messages at the speed of light. 

42 Studio prides itself on building website masterpieces through streamlined workflows to provide industry-leading results to future web3 leaders. Want to see for yourself? Check out our case studies.