What makes a good website?

Making a good website can be hard, as you have to constantly think of your target audience and what they want. There are a lot of things that you have to include in a website these days in order to make them worth going on.
Before you create your website, you have to think about your target audience and the demographics surrounding them. What do they like? What do they want? What would make them click onto a website? Without researching your audience, you can't even start to plan your website. (It would be a bit stupid if you did.) You need a general idea of what you're going to create. It is vital that you do this before you plan your layout as you may create one that isn't easy to navigate and you may have to change it halfway through making it which would be very time consuming.
After all the research, you have to think about what you want it to look like and the colours that you are going to use in the design.
A website has to look good, so that means no tacky bright colours or dodgy trumpet music in the background. (If a website doesn't look appealing, the audience is most likely not going to type it into their address bar.) It's good to not add colours that clash with each-other as it just makes the website hurt the audiences eyes. A lot like this one here... 

(Image taken from http://www.webdesignfromscratch.com/web-design/colour/)

Ouch. Right? This website may be very informative and contain everything that the target audience wants, but it's a sight for sore-eyes and is very distracting. The only thing that sticks out is the colour red which kind of gives of the wrong kind of mood, as if something is going to pop up on the screen and scare the socks of your feet. You don't want to put off your audience before they've even explored what you've created.
When you've got that out of the way, you can start to add images and content into the website. It is important that you get the size of the fonts right, having a font too small or too big can hurt the readers eyes. This also applies to the images as well, they need to be at a size that isn't confusing to the eye.
A good thing that seems to work well is links and advertisements to other websites that might be similar to yours. Links and adverts are good because they take up the blank space on your website that would otherwise make it look bare. It is important that they do not clash with the design of your website too because it just then makes the whole thing off-putting.
There are a lot more things that make up a good website but the main thing is planning. You should never start creating your website before you know what you're going to add to it. The more you plan, the more your idea grows and the more it grows the better it will be. Once you've sorted every detail of the website out, it should be easier to make it.

-Rebecca Hickey