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Top Ten Essential Website Features

When creating a website for your business and once you have your domain agreed upon there are some big decisions you need to make. So here at Faber Web Design Coventry we have provided a guide to help you decide on the must haves and the have nots for your new website. This guide will help you ensure your new potential customers have the best best experience when visiting your website, therefore allowing your business to gain a positive digital footprint and increase engagement with your company.

1.A Clear Roadmap

Of course your website should be pleasing to the eye, but its more important for it to be useful. This starts with beginning to design and plan how you want your website to be mapped out and how it should work. The reason for this is mainly for your potential customers and user to have a positive experience when browsing your website yet it plays a very big roll with your SEO (search engine optimization) as Google considers the content and structure of your website, when being considered for search rankings.

2.Contact Information

The most important of your website aside from design is most definitely your contact information, this explains why in most cases you contact information has its own section within a website. Contacting the company of a website you are browsing should be the easiest thing for the user to do, and unfortunately in many cases it isn’t. Taking these things in to consideration, your email address, phone number etc, shouldn’t be uploaded on or within an image, it should be clear and be able to be clicked on or copied and pasted, the aim is to provide maximum convenience for the browser when trying to contact you. Most smartphones provide the ability to “click to call”, this allows an easy process for users.

3.Business Information

A mistake made by many when building a website is that they build a website that they want not necessarily a website that they need, you most definitely shouldn’t neglect the basic features you need for YOUR website. Content is crucial for your SEO yet a good idea is to keep your company statement and goal simple in order for your browser to get the information they need and only that. The main point is to provide the feature that are tailored to your website, depending on your business, you should provide things that are relivent such as, restaurants need a menu and lists of locations, maps etc. Retailers need product information and clear hi-res images. An important feature for service industries is also customer referrals and testimonials

4.Navigation

Navigation is key, a website is rendered useless without clear navigation. The names of the pages on your website and how to get there should be easy to understand and logical such as contact us, about us, home etc. It is important to think about what people and potential customers will be doing on your website, will they be placing an order? Looking for a quote? Becoming a member? You need to make your goals clear, obvious and easy to find for said customers. Provide features on your site such as action buttons and items to help the user do what they want to do in the easiest way possible.

5.Security

All websites need some effort when your securing information, if you’re selling something on your website this is a must. Secure your site with an SSL certificate, the SSL will encrypt communications between you and your clients, this include payment information and other sensitive information. Having this feature provide a layer of comfort for your clients, so they feel safe providing there details and important information with you and your website.

6.Social Media

If you have social media accounts for your business as well as a website, it is a good idea to integrate these social media platforms to your website as it plays a major role when boosting you SEO and it also improves your business’ footprint as you gain followings across numerous social platforms, therefore increasing your website visits. If you can keep users engaged on these social platforms and maintain a presence with regular content it is definitely worth the time invested in promoting your business on social media.

7.Mobile and Device Ready

Most web traffic in the modern day is sourced from mobile and device searches as smartphones grow more mainstream, 70% of tasks completion happens within one hour on mobile sites, meaning that people are often browsing on the web with intent, so it is very important to make your website readable on handheld devices. This is called responsive web design, which allows you to use adaptable width, so that your website layout will adjust accordingly to the screen it is being displayed on. The majority of layout in web design are adjustable and all images are scalable to create a better experience when browsing on devices.

8.FAQ

With almost all business, people with have questions. To make it easier for yourself to answer all these questions the best thing to do is as you hear concerns from customers and receive feedback via email or contact forms, gather all the most frequent questions and answer them as clear as possible and provide these answer on a FAQ page. You will find these question often consist of sizing and delivery enquires or cancellation and return policies if you are selling products.

9.Hosting

Hosting plays a major part in your websites usability, you need your website on a mainstream provider, which also provides 24/7 technical support and assistance. Having poor hosting can result in many problems such as a slow site therefore loosing potiental customers as no one wants to wait for your website to load. It can also effect your SEO in a big way since many search engines algorithms detect website loading speeds.

10.Feature you DON’T need

Most of the time in Web Design less is more, as mentioned you want to provide users with a quick and easy experience in order to get what they came to your website for. So things to avoid when building your website is Music, Flash Players, anything that autoplay i.e music or videos and finally unnecessary information and media, things like these are not needed and will essentially slow down your website pages loading time.

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