There are certain features that every website should have. They don’t all have to look the same of course, like all cars don’t have to be the same color, but they all need wheels. Successful websites all incorporate their own version of certain important elements. What are they? Keep reading—the 17 features below should be included on most websites, though they’re not listed here in any particular order of importance.
1. Home Page
The home page is often the first page of your website that anyone sees, so make a powerful first impression. Your unique value proposition—that quality that makes your business different—should be prominently displayed, as well as any core messages about what you offer. Your navigation menu should be easily located and should reveal in a broad scope what your visitors can expect to find on the site.
2. Company Info & About Us
The About Us page shouldn’t be a hard-sell, but it is an opportunity to tell your customers what you have to offer and why you’re qualified to offer it. Your core message should be conveyed throughout your site, and if it is, the About Us page likely won’t be a tipping point for a potential customer, but it is an important page.
Recently completed projects, clients, and company contact info should be on separate pages, but do include details of trade associations you belong to, recent awards or publicity, and emblems of organizations you associate with. This brings up an important point: update your About Us page every now and then!
You may choose to take a personal approach and include staff photos and biographies or be more formal, but either way this page should definitely be on your site.
3. Contact Us
You should have a specific page dedicated to your contact information, including official business name and store address, phone numbers, toll-free numbers, fax number, customer service phone numbers, email addresses, and your website address, even if you think it’s obvious that people know it.
4. Products & Services
Create a separate page that is specifically oriented to each service you offer or each different category of products. These pages should contain as much detail specifically related to that item as you can include with respect to length and usability. If you engage in online advertising, these pages will be your landing pages that are tied to certain keywords. Include basic information such as contact info, pricing, links to shipping data, etc, on each page, so people who are surfing can get the info they need quickly and easily in one place regardless of the page they land on.
5. Clear Pricing
If your website is vague about pricing, you’ll quickly lose customers to another site that’s not vague. Customers don’t want to have to click links, email, or call to get prices. Prices for all of your products and services should be plainly available. If it’s not possible to pin down a price, indicate a range or lower limit.
6. FAQ’s
Most, businesses include a Frequently Asked Questions page with answers to their most common inquiries. This has become a standard website feature, however, most businesses don’t take the concept far enough. Instead of answering three or four common questions, keep going and answer 10 more. That not only provides your website with keyword-rich content but increases the number of indexable pages on your site, both of which make your site more search engine-friendly.
7. Testimonials & Reviews
Including testimonials is something that not enough businesses do, unfortunately. It’s never too late to begin asking your current or recent customers for testimonials. Send out an email a few days after they receive their order and ask them to share with you how satisfied they were with their product and experience. Testimonials can (and should) have their own page, and they can also be set up so that your site pulls a different testimonial from a file each time a page reloads, so repeat visitors to your site will see different testimonials.
An option to leave a review or rating can be included for each product on your site. These features increase trust among potential customers and increase the relevant content on your site.
8. Sign Up Button or Link
If you plan on having any sort of mailing list for a newsletter or other direct communication, this feature is a must. Place the sign-up button near the top of your website so visitors don’t have to scroll down to find it. Add this “opt in” button to each page of your website, not just your home page, so that visitors see it no matter what page they land on.
Ask for only a name and email address—just enough personal information to get started. Ask customers to enter their address twice, to avoid having misspelled or incomplete addresses on your list.
9. Newsletter or Ezine Archive
When you create an email newsletter, that’s an investment of time that can be used in more than one way: send it out to your mailing list and use it to enhance and increase the content on your site. Archiving your newsletters creates more indexable and keyword-rich pages on your site, and provides an organic opportunity to add links to other pages on your site. Search engines love cross-linking to relevant and related content located elsewhere on a site.
10. Resources and Articles
You know your business better than anyone. Your knowledge doesn’t end at the boundaries of your product pages. Write a handful of articles related to your products and services, or even better, write some on a regular basis, and add them to a resources section. This provides an opportunity for keyword-rich content and organic linking, and provides content that helps visitors find information.
As examples, if your site sells soccer balls, write articles on the origin of the game, how soccer balls are made, the teams that win the most, the greatest players in the history of the game, and tips on how to tell when a soccer ball needs to be replaced.
If you don’t consider yourself a writer, no problem. Sketch out an outline and hire a professional copywriter to finish the job. It will be a worthy investment.
11. Search Feature
A search function that lets visitors type in a word or phrase is practically a must. It lets visitors quickly and easily find what they want, with (depending on the integration method) Google-quality results that are pulled just from your website.
12. Survey or Poll
Offer an opportunity for your site visitors to tell you what they think about your products, services, website, even other general interest topics. (Do you prefer Twitter or Facebook for updates?, for instance) Most of the time, it is only the most vocal, unhappy customers that you hear from. Surveys allow you to hear from a greater range of customers because you are reaching out to the customer rather than waiting for them to contact you when there is a problem. Polls make your website more interesting, particularly if the question changes regularly.
13. Calendar of Events
Include a page for your speaking engagements or other public appearance schedule. List conferences you plan to attend for the year. Do you add new merchandise seasonally? Monthly? Yep, put that on a calendar.
Beyond this, regardless of your industry you could consider including a calendar from your local tourist association. There are a number of local connections that can be exploited to your advantage with a calendar or schedule.
14. Photo Gallery
A photo gallery can be used in multiple ways depending on your website. Add Before & After photos of installations, series of photos for how-tos, or even allow your customers to submit their own photos.
When adding photos, consider basic search engine optimization and give each photo a meaningful name— “GrayWoolSweater.jpg” rather than “IMG34.jpg”—then use descriptive alt-tags that will appear in case the photo cannot be displayed for various reasons.
And make sure the photo files aren’t hidden behind Javascript. The Java allows for some cool slideshow effects, but search engines can’t read it, so the spiders will not be able to find and follow the links in that menu and won’t be able to index that content.
15. Press or Newsroom
Create a Press page or Newsroom where you post any company news, press releases, articles written about you, anything about your company that appears in any form of media. These rooms are a great way to integrate multimedia and social marketing. Not enough business do this. Maybe they think they don’t get enough press to warrant it, but without the room, when you do get the press you won’t have anything to do with it.
16. Policy Page & Copyright Notices
Offer a money back guaranty and/or no-hassle return policy. Clearly spell out your policies and make it a selling point.
Don’t make customers guess whether or not you will sell their personal information the minute they leave your site. Let them know clearly that you won’t.
Protect your intellectual property. Add a short but to-the-point notice that all aspects of your website—design, text, graphics, applications, software, source code, and anything else you created—are copyright; include the statement Copyright (c) Year, Your Company Name”.
17. Site Map
A site map helps make your site easier to navigate. Enough said? The value in a site map is that it’s simple, helps visitors find pages on your site that may not be readily viewed by navigation links, and helps search engines index your most recent updated information.
Bonus Tip: Plan Ahead
Before you start completely rewriting each and every page on your site, make sure you think it through. Come up with a plan for each page, and change your content slowly. It takes time for search engines to crawl and index sites, and they become less confident in a site if too much changes all at once.
