Are you starting a new website project? If you’re overwhelmed and not sure where to start, we understand.
There is a lot to consider when building a good website. While we know each business is unique, you should always plan for a few crucial factors when designing and building a website.
If you want your business to be successful in the modern marketplace, you need a professional website design.
Your website design and content need to stand out and be unique. How you position your company’s website differentiates it from your competitors.
A good website is well-organized, easy to navigate, modern-looking in terms of style and layout, functional, and motivates visitors to do business with you. If your website accessible to your customer not only visually – but as well as other factors include auditory and mobility making it accessible to all
Be it Linkedin banners or social media images, for that matter, images and infographics are now undoubtedly the backbone of your website (and content, of course!). Moreover, image sizes play an important role in enticing customers.
The specifications for the right image dimensions keep changing, so you need to stay updated to get more engagement.
In this article, we’ll share with you a list of website features that every website must haves, and we’re hoping your business could benefit from it.
So, Why Should You Consider Having A Website For Your Brand?
As important as social media is for your brand or business, a website shapes online recognition in a way that social media can’t offer.
A good website will clearly outline the services and products you provide and gives your audience a better idea of what your business is all about.
Accessibility
Your website is accessible worldwide, permitting increased exposure and traffic due to boundless demographic reach. A good website usually provides a map and directions to the company’s shop or offices for visitors to find the location easily.
Your website is the space to present your products and services point of difference. It helps build a strong connection with your target audience and establish yourself as an expert in your niche.
Without a website, you are risking your target market going to your competitors. It’s crucial to position your business as the industry authority.
Build Credibility
Having a sound strategy for your website and online presence allows you to properly introduce and market your business. It’s also essential because it helps to establish your credibility as a business.
With a website, you have the scope to represent your audiences and find ways on why your business will appear trustworthy.
SEO
If you plan to leverage digital marketing to increase your leads and grow your business, you probably want to drive traffic to your landing page or website.
One of the most vital functions of SEO services is increasing visibility, which means making it possible and more accessible for your potential customers to find you when they search for something you offer.
And visibility is frankly related to your site ranking.
The higher your site ranks on a search engine result page (SERP), the more likely your customers will see you and visit your site. The more effective your SEO endeavors, the higher your ranking and better the visibility.
If you have a website, SEO can aid you in getting free targeted traffic from search engines.
Read also: How to Write Perfect Meta Title & Meta Description For SEO
Conversion
Executing digital marketing strategies will help your business to reach its potential and target audience. You’ll be able to connect with your customers and increase conversion. If you don’t have a website, you’re missing out on online traffic.
By having a website, you’ll capture the site visitors’ data, which is valuable. It can lead to an extensive understanding of your audiences so that you can build relationships with your prospects, customers, and leads.
Ranking on Google’s first page for your niche and keywords is every digital marketer and business owner’s goal.
A website helps your business attract leads without you having to pay for it. And a good website adds value to your business as an intangible advantage.
16 Website Elements That Help Build A Good Website
A Simple Straight-To-The-Point Web Address
The URL is short for Uniform Resource Locator, and a site URL is a location of a particular website, file, or page on the Internet.
Many people never cared so much about URLs, especially when it’s the one that leads to their landing page.
If you manage your website or planning to develop one, it’s vital to understand how URL’s works and how it’s essential to your website conversion.
These are three essential components of URL:
- The protocol – HTTP or HTTPS.
- The domain name (including the TLD) that identifies a site.
- The path is leading to a specific web page.
Each URL is put together of multiple parts, and the way it is created will have different effects on your website’s security and SEO.
Here is why your URL is essential:
- URLs are often the text used to link to a webpage
- URLs are customarily printed on marketing collateral such as business cards and emails
- URLs are an influential factor in how your webpage may rank in search engines
- URLs are often spoken by your sales or support staff
A Secure Hosting Platform
All successful businesses will have elements of a good website as their foundation. In this digital era, you can’t forego good website hosting services for this very reason.
How are you to have a quality and profitable online presence if you have poor website hosting? It’s a no-brainer.
Whether you have a personal site, blog, or a large-scale business, security is a priority. Security is likely the feature of web hosting that is most essential to every website owner, and if it’s not, it should be.
Lack of security can be disappointing to a business if these problems result in loss of income, identity theft, or hacking.
Thus, it’s vital to understand what security aspects you should look for and how to ensure your website’s host offers protection sufficiently.
Here is why you should invest in a secure hosting platform:
Decrease website load time – A fast website provides a better user experience overall for the visitor, which is vital to how they feel about your website and your business. Good hosting and fast time loading sites help your site to convert better.
Frequent website backups if anything were to go wrong – A professionally done web hosting platform has a reputation to protect your site because it will back up all your data. This means you can restore all the information after an issue or use the backed-up files from your web host.
Search engine rankings & SEO – If your website is down when the search engines are trying to visit your site and analyze it, your rankings will be badly affected. So it’s in your best interest to use secure website hosting platforms to ensure your site crawlability and the best possible search engine rankings.
Website Design & Style That’s Friendly
As Steve Jobs said, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works”.
The success or failure of your website depends most heavily on usability and functionality. An aesthetically pleasing website means nothing if it does not have a practical user experience.
Visitors come to your website with a purpose in mind. It’s a hard pill to swallow, but rarely the intention is to admire the beauty of the site’s graphic design.
Though fancy layouts can be visually pleasing, you don’t want the graphics to distract visitors from discovering why they came to your site in the first place.
When designing your website, you should always keep the user in mind and serve their needs. Think of your website as a shop.
No matter how beautiful your shop is, if you don’t have a good salesperson or a confusing stock arrangement, nobody will come back and revisit your store.
Essential things to keep in mind for successful navigation on your website are logical page planning and clickable buttons.
A good website design should take visitors as little effort as possible to click onto your website and make a decision that works in your favor. It is recommended that visitors find the information they need on your site in less than three clicks.
Your website should be organized to naturally gravitate towards the essential elements first, like your site content. This can be done through the use of sizes, placements, and colors.
Minimalist website design uses white space to make a page appear clean, sophisticated and professionally done. It also helps visitors focus on essential features of the website.
Most minimalist websites avoid unnecessary texts and images, leaving them simple and will not overwhelm visitors. The eye will naturally be drawn to the main features of the page since there are no bothersome elements.
Read Also: Excellent WordPress Website Design To Check Out
A Clear Description of Who You Really Are
If someone stumbles upon your website, they don’t need to pry your site just to know what you’re offering or what you’re doing.
You need to clearly provide the nature of your business, the company, vision, mission and services, and products you’re offering.
A website that manages to provide a clear description of who they are and the services they provide will convert better than a website that doesn’t.
Make it a priority to create a home page to provide general information about your product and services, with specific links to your product pages.
This may seem like a no-brainer, but many companies are purposely vague about their location.
Some prefer to do their business 100 percent online and see no reason to publish an address or a contact number. Others are home-based, or they worry that sharing a street address, city or town will somehow hinder them.
Sharing a physical location, even one that no one will ever visit, comforts a customer that your business is legitimate and genuine.
Easy-To-Navigate Site Map
A sitemap is as essential to creating a new website as a map to planning a road trip.
Without it, both the user and the journey through your site could lead to unpleasant stops and distractions. As the name implies, a sitemap is a visual representation of your site, helping visitors get the answer and solution they are looking for.
It’s an essential tool for developing a usable and good site, a sitemap is one of the elements that shouldn’t be excluded.
An easy-to-navigate site map will take users where you want them to go instead of scrolling up and down aimlessly and ultimately leaving your site in frustration.
A well-built sitemap will make your website searchable by every search engine, providing users with correct search results when looking for keywords related to the content you provide.
Always make sure that your site navigation is laid out. It’s recommended to use a navigation menu so the visitors can see the website content under each heading from almost every page.
A well-structured sitemap should also be linked to your homepage. This makes it easier for search engines to discover it and follow the pages on your site.
Testimonials & Clientele Profile
Customer testimonials are a vital part of building up your online business reputation.
It can help with the conversion rate of visitors to your business website. Testimonials and clientele profiles add legitimacy to your site and make people trust you and are more willing to buy your products and services.
Customer testimonials add content to your site, and they help you appear valuable and trustworthy for people who encounter your site for the first time.
Many people don’t realize how difficult it can be to convince someone to open their wallet for the first time on a brand or service that is not familiar to them. And testimonials or clientele profiles can help you do this.
They make people feel more comfortable making a buying decision if they know other people have made the same purchase for similar reasons and are happy with their purchase. Amazon and eBay base their whole platform around customer reviews and rates.
Sharing real testimonials will not only be engaging and believable, but they are also one of the best ways of advertising since it comes from customers that have used your products and services.
An Obvious Call To Action – CTA
If you have a website, you need to have a CTA or call to action – sometimes multiple CTA’s as well.
There is no such thing as an effective marketing campaign unless there is a successful CTA.
Conversions, revenue, profit, and business – all these aspects depend on powerful calls to action. The CTA is so mighty and so foundational to the success of any digital marketing strategy.
There are tons of different types of CTA. You can use a call to action when you need the user to do something or respond in some way.
A call to action can be used to encourage or spur visitors to take further steps like downloading a PDF, applying for a product or service, registering an account, making a purchase, or even clicking through to another page.
Here are some of the most common types of CTAs uses by online marketers:
- Buy buttons/“Add to cart.”
- Contact us
- Subscription signups
- “Read More”
- “Try it Today.”
- Information-gathering forms
- Social media share buttons/widgets.
The fact is, calls to action can go just about anywhere, and they should. Posting calls to actions all over your site is a great way to attract more conversions.
A call to action is meant to persuade your site’s visitors to take a specific action that benefits you. So you must use all your creativity, persuasive and compelling effort into creating your CTA as excellent as it can be.
To make sure your CTAs work, two things need to occur. First, visitors need to notice them without any effort, and secondly, visitors must instantly know what they should do.
Place your CTAs strategically so that your visitors receive maximum attention and visual focus.
Employees Profile
What’s a company’s greatest asset? It’s the people who work for you.
When you take care of your team, they will care for you in return. The people who work for or with you are your business. Tap into this reliable asset and use it to your benefit.
Visit any company’s website and click on the “team” page, and you’ll see their employee profiles.
Employee profiles help to bring your team to life and define your business brand.
If you have a blog, in the author section, post the author’s image along with their name. This way, people who read it can see who wrote such informative content, and these help build a great relationship with your client. After all, good work deserves a little credit, don’t you think?
Fresh and Quality Blog Content
There is no denying that content is king, and it is one of the most crucial facets of any website.
You may have a great-looking website design and a user-friendly site, but it’s the content that your visitors are likely to be most captivated in.
Whenever you are posting new articles or adding new videos to your blog and pages, make sure they are high quality, fresh, valuable, and informative to your readers.
Regularly posting fresh content to your blog provides new and additional information for anyone who has already seen and read your existing content.
Adding pages that are low-quality, thin content on your website will lead to adverse effects on your site’s status.
Website visitors may decide to take action like signing up for your emails, make a purchase, or inquire more about what you offer if they didn’t the first time they visited your site.
What content is needed for a website will vary based on niches and industries, so keyword research and assessment will be beneficial to many businesses and organizations.
Positioning yourself as an authority within your niche is a perfect way to build trust and grow your site’s traffic. Actively publishing content to your site and being at the forefront of your industry will establish you as an expert.
For example, if you have a digital marketing blog, your content should be all about digital marketing, so the target audience will know what you’re offering.
Content marketing will always result in links, shares, and brand shout-outs, of all which are tremendously beneficial. To run an effective content marketing campaign, it’s essential to have quality content on your website.
Stay updated with the latest trends in your niche, so you’ll get more website content ideas.
Read also: Top Digital Marketing Blogs You Should Read To Grow Your Business
Live Chat
Customer Service is a structural part of any business. Small business owners mostly manage it themselves, while medium to large-scale companies either employ in-house or outsource to specialized companies.
In today’s technological environment and increased use of social media, users commonly expect a business to act fast and provide instant support.
The old-school way of phone support gets slammed with tons of calls waiting, especially when you’re running promotions or there are problems with the services.
This has been an issue for many businesses that don’t have the capability for hiring large teams, thus having a frustrated customer base.
Email is still a preferable way of communication for many businesses. But why risk your customer’s loyalty by asking them to wait 24 hours when they need instant help?
When it involves an issue like resetting their account password or needing more information on a specific product, you want to address it as soon as possible.
If your customer base is from all over the world, it makes even more sense to provide excellent support. A Live Chat feature makes it so much easier for businesses to interact with their customers from any location.
Live chats help you manage your customer service costs significantly by minimizing the demand for call support. Moreover, you can interact with a more extensive customer base with your existing team because a helpful and skillful live chat agent can easily manage up to two to three customer interactions at once.
Search Functionality
If you have a large website, a search bar lets your visitors search what they are looking for real quick. If you have a well-made blog, or to start an eCommerce site, or hundreds of categorized pages, this could be hard for visitors to find what they want only by just clicking around and scrolling up and down.
Think of the search bar as a way for visitors to “ask for help” when they get stuck in your site’s navigation. If they can’t find a good place to go next, they’ll go to your search function.
The easier it is for users to navigate your site, the more likely they stay and explore. If it’s complex and challenging for them to find what they want, they will leave your site and go to your competitors. Allow your users to see as much as possible of your site with a search bar!
A search bar on your site will serve as your website’s own personal “search engine,” which many people are familiar with nowadays. It also allows your site for a seamless and smooth experience for your users. Don’t hold your visitors back from exploring your website – add a search bar to your site soon!
Social Media
Creating an ideal website for your business requires the correct utilization of social media. Social media marketing has been known as a perfect way of bringing online traffic to your site.
In addition to this, social media links play essential roles in developing your website as long as it has a responsive, accessible website design.
Social media links offer connections to top social media sites Malaysia networks such as Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
Any potential visitors to your site should have fast and easy access to your social media links if they want to learn more about your product and services.
It also helps your business in creating a visible online presence that differentiates you from your competitors.
Services Page / Product Page
When people are choosing services or products, they are searching for answers – and your site should provide them the solution and answer to their problems.
Your services and the product pages are a huge opportunity to impress your visitors with what you have to offer. So you need a creative, impressive service and product page, so you’ll find it easy to get new customers online.
Many product or services page titles are bland and straightforward, such as “What we offer” or “Our Services, because they think it will suffice.
You don’t want people landing on your page to be confused about where they are and what they are looking for on your site.
Make efforts to break up blocks of text with visual elements to ensure your visitors are engaged and interested.
Your visitors may know your product and services page is all about promoting your business and boasting that you’re the best. They’re going to take most of what you share with a grain of salt unless you can add some social proof.
Don’t let your product and service page be just a simple description of what you offer – you need to lead your visitors to take the next step.
If you provide products, you could add a “Buy Now” or “Get Now” button. And if you offer services, this could be the “Contact us to learn more” call to action button.
Newsletter/Latest News
The point of emails and newsletters is to provide your visitors with updates about your business, products, and services.
An email newsletter shouldn’t be used for a hard sell, but it should be interesting and informative rather than a pushy sales piece.
That doesn’t mean that newsletters are simply used to update your customers.
They can also be used to encourage your customers to take action, like pre-selling and asking them to view a product, or checking on your latest published blog post.
Newsletters are generally the life force of your digital marketing campaign. For the past decade, email marketing has proven to be remarkably more successful than social media marketing.
Privacy Policy Page
A privacy page is probably one of the crucial legal agreements for any online business, regardless of how or where they operate: website, desktop, or app.
The absolute reason why you need a Privacy Policy is that it is required by law.
Your Privacy Policy needs to be easily accessible, and you must obtain active consent from visitors before collecting any of their data.
404 Page Not Found
A 404 page is also known as an “error page,” “Page Not Found,” “404 Not Found.”
“The requested URL was not found on this server” or “HTTP 404 Not Found”. This page specifies that the user reached the domain they requested, but the URL path offered no information.
So why does a good website need to have a custom 404 Page Not Found page?
There are two types of 404 error pages; Generic 404 and Custom 404. A custom 404 helps in three different ways.
- Minimize user frustration
- Provides linking and branding to other segments of your site
- In several cases, it may even lead to conversions
A good and popular way to turn a 404 error into more traffic is by including a search box on the page. Give your users the option to search for relevant information on your site. This can help convert them into buying customers.
When done correctly and with purpose, a 404 Not Found Page can not not only keep the users on your site but make them explore and check out what else you have to offer.
To successfully convert visitors to a customer from a 404 page is by doing some of these things:
- It should be free of any advertising
- Your site should let the user know they have reached the page in error, but how you let them know can reflect the personality of the site
- It should guide the visitor to other pages or the home page
- It should be a static HTML and not contain complicated scripts that might create more errors for the visitor
- It should load easily
What’s Next?
Developing a good website cannot be done without the proper plan and ideas.
The most important thing you should keep in mind is to pay the required attention that your site deserves because a bad site does nothing more than waste time and money.
You also need to evaluate other aspects in making a good website development, like creativity and performance, so that your website has a strong foundation.
Setting up a partnership with the correct web developer or trusted digital marketing agency ensures a lot about your site’s performance on search engines goes smoothly.
Need a website for business?
One Search Pro can help you develop a successful website and help improve your business at the same time. Contact us now!
