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Five Must Have Features for any Website

Five Must Have Features for any Website

five must have features for any website

Five Must Have Features for any Website

A website is often the first impression a customer has of a business. So, it's important to make sure your website has the information and features customers need and want. Here are five must-have features for any website.

Are you in the process of building a new website for your business? Or considering refreshing your existing website? If so, you'll want to make sure it has the features necessary to help your business succeed. 

Here are five must-have features for any website: 

  1. A user-friendly design that is easy to navigate 
  2. Effective search engine capabilities 
  3. Well written text content
  4. Good quality visuals
  5. A modern, responsive design that renders correctly on all devices, and bonus = accessibility

 

  1. A user-friendly design that is easy to navigate 

The design of your website is really what gives the visitor the first visual impression.  How you design the initial view - the above the scroll header, navigation, can have a significant impact on what your visitor will do next.

 

Making sure your design is crisp, clear, modern, and visually appealing is step one.  Does that first view make someone want to stay, and scroll further, or click on a call to action or navigation item?

 

User experience, or UX as it is known in digital marketing, is believed to be one of the top factors that Google uses to rank a website.  But more than that, once you have that valuable visitor land on your page, you want them to be able to get to where they want to get to as fast as possible.  Make sure your navigation and pages do not go too many clicks deep, and clearly label all menu options.

 

PROTip

One of the most common reasons a user will visit a website is to discover your location, phone number or email address.  Make these as easy to find as possible, perhaps in your top navigation or in the footer of each page!

pro tip for website navigation

  1. Effective search engine capabilities 

 

Only 49% of small business owners invest in SEO for better business visibility, yet 93% of online experiences start from a search on Google, and 50% of users discover a new business or product after a search.

Source https://www.sitebuilderreport.com/small-business-website-stats

 

Being at the top of relevant search results is one of the top goals for any business.  This is because it is proven that website traffic from Google is higher quality than any other form of traffic.  These clicks are from people searching for your business or service.  Setting up your website for success right from the beginning is a critical feature and a must-have for your business success.

 

This means planning out your Search Engine Optimization in advance, and including tools on your website that will help it get better SEO rankings.  

 

Some of these items include:

  • Setting up Google Analytics & Google Search Console
  • Having an onsite SEO tool such as Yoast which can help you identify areas of improvement on each page & blog post
  • Building your landing pages with keywords in the Meta Descriptions, Heading Tags and Title Tags
  • Adding ALT text, or alternative text attributes to all images (using your keywords)

 

  1. Well written text content

 

Well written text content is a must have feature on any website for both the user experience, SEO and ultimate performance & results.

 

Having professionally written text content on all of your pages, for your products, and in blog posts will improve your chances of converting a website visitor into a business customer.

 

In a recent round of audits of approx 100 websites, the number one SEO issue was low word count on multiple pages of business websites.

 

Google and other search engines spider & crawl the text of a website in order to rank that website for keywords.  So you want your text to be not only optimized so humans can understand, but also so search engines can.  This means the proper structure of breaking up pages into sections divided by Headings and Heading tags.

 

  1. Good quality visuals

 

The human eye is naturally drawn to visually appealing images, graphics and photos, and often the reaction to images is emotional.  The feeling that visitors get to your website based on the visuals they see when they get there might be the deciding factor if they keep scrolling.  

Use good quality photography on your website, either actual photos of your business & product or extremely high quality stock photos that essentially don’t look like they are stock.

 

Also consider your colour scheme.  Making the menu bar and accent areas of your website match your branding can have an incredible effect on the professional look & feel.

 

Don’t forget to load all of your website visuals with ALT TEXT telling Google not only what the image is of, but including keywords for SEO purposes.

website tip add ALT text to images

 

5. A modern, responsive design that renders correctly on all devices, and bonus = accessibility

Lastly but certainly not least, your website must have a modern, responsive design that is available to visitors from any device including a mobile phone.  Not only is this critical for sheer user experience, but Google now penalizes websites if they are NOT mobile friendly.

If you are not sure if your website is mobile friendly you can actually check this on Google by following this link:

https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly

And we couldn't talk about websites and not discuss the possibility of making your website fully ACCESSIBLE to all users.  You can reference this post to learn more about what Web Accessibility is and how it can benefit your business.  

Dufferin Media Can Help!

When you’re ready to take your website to the next level, we’d be happy to help. Our team can book a discovery call with you so that we can learn more about your business and what features are essential for you. We want to make sure that your website not only looks great but also functions in a way that helps you achieve your goals. Contact us today to get started!

 

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