Is Your Website Missing These 5 Key Features?

Have you ever tried to bake a cake without flour or eggs? It wouldn’t turn out right or taste very good, would it? These ingredients are necessary to have a moist, delicious cake. It’s the same with your website design and features. If you’re missing key ingredients, you won’t get the right results, whether it be selling your product, service, or getting people to sign up for your newsletter. Here are 5 key features that we believe every website should have...

1. User-Friendly Navigation and Design - If your website is not aesthetically pleasing, the content is hard to read, or people can’t find the information they need, they’ll leave your website in a heartbeat.

2. Proper On-Site Optimization - If you want your website to be discovered via search engines, your website needs to be optimized. This means including keywords in your title tags and page descriptions along with making sure you publish unique, fresh content that clearly communicates your company’s message. Here is more information about using descriptive titles and headings for web pages.

Good on-screen optimization will not only benefit from SEO and user readability, it will also help users with any type of accessibility issues (e.g. hearing or visual problems) because it allows assisted technologies, such as screen readers, to better deliver a web page’s content through alternate means.

3. Call to Action - What do you want your customers to do? Buy your product or service? Sign up for your newsletter? Download your free report? A call-to-action is a way of getting your website visitors to take action. For example, you could include a “Follow us on Twitter” button or incorporate a lead capture form that entices them to “Download this free report for exclusive tips...” Also, consider using a “limited time” offer to get people to take action NOW.

4. Analytics - How are people finding your website? Which sites are they coming from? What are the most popular pages? These are some of the things you would want to know so that you can make adjustments to marketing efforts or tweak your site’s content. Without an analytics tool, you’re essentially putting up a site and just “hoping for the best”.

5. Contact Page - It’s interesting, but you would be surprised how many websites don’t have a contact page. If potential customers have a question about your product/service, how can they get in touch with you? Your contact page should also have links to your company’s social media accounts like Facebook or Twitter if people choose to contact you through those channels.

Developing and building a website is an art form, but when done properly, it can propel your business to the next level and create loyal customers. If you’re thinking about a website redesign, contact us to request an estimate!

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