If you have a website for your business, or intend on getting one soon, you’ll want to take note of these 8 ingredients to an effective business website as listed below. They might seem quite obvious, however you’d be surprised how many websites are missing at least one.
Those eight website ingredients are;
- Have a domain name that is memorable
- Each page should have one primary purpose
- Have a way to collect email addresses
- Encourage visitors to share your content
- Produce interesting and relevant content
- Give visitors a way to contact you
- Make it legible
- Have a call to action
Let’s now get into them in detail!
Have a domain name that is memorable
Ideally you will want your domain name to be www.thenameofyourbusiness.com.au (or .com or whichever extension is best for you). This will make it easy for your customers to find you online.
Avoid dashes in your domain if you can because people will just forget those when they go looking for you.
Also steer clear of the free blogging websites if you’re setting up a website for your business. You don’t want a website name with the words WordPress or blogspot in them. That will just confuse your customers.
Each page should have one primary purpose
Have you ever visited a website and there’s so much information you didn’t know what to do or what to look at first? Don’t confuse your website visitors. If you want them to click on a button then put that button front row and centre and ask them to click it. Don’t confuse them by asking them to click 3 buttons and look at 3 pages.
So have a think. What’s the number one purpose of your home page? What’s the purpose of your about page? What’s the purpose of your sales page? Now go and make sure that purpose is communicated clearly to your visitors.
Have a way to collect email addresses
It takes a lot of work to ensure that your potential customers can find your website. You might have worked hard on your search engine optimisation (SEO), or you’ve written a lot of great content, you might have paid for traffic through advertising or you might be working hard to drive traffic to your website from your social media platforms.
You’ve gone to all that effort to get people to your website. So now they’re there the clever thing to do is to ask for their email address. That way you’ll be able to contact them directly when you have something to offer and you can remind them that you exist so hopefully they’ll visit your effective business website again and again.
Don’t forget that most people won’t purchase from you until they’ve been to your website a number of times so make it easy for them to keep coming back.
Encourage visitors to share your content
Say a potential customer visits your website and they love what they see. They’re dying to share your content marketing with their friends! Help them to do just that by making sure that you have social media like buttons, pin button, share buttons and tweet buttons in all the strategic places on your website.
Produce interesting and relevant content
If you have a website then it goes without saying that you’ll need to produce content to be published on that website. Make sure that your content is interesting and relevant to your visitors. Give them a reason to hang around, read more and share.
And also make sure that your content works for you and includes some keywords that people will be searching for. That is, make sure that your content is SEO friendly.
Give visitors a way to contact you
Sometimes people just need to ask you a question before they commit to buying from you. An effective business website makes that easy. If they have to spend more than 3 seconds finding out how to contact you, you can bet they’ve moved on to a competitors website instead.
Make it legible
Yes, how your website looks is important. That beautiful script font that you’ve chosen looks really pretty. However can anyone read it? Remember that a lovely looking website is useless if visitors can’t read your content.
My pet peeve? Websites with really tiny font. Even my coke bottle thick glasses are useless on some websites and I give up pretty quickly.
Have a call to action
What do you want the visitors to your website to do once they get there? Do you want them to ‘click here’, ‘sign up now’, ‘buy now’ or ‘register’? Whatever it is, tell them! Your visitors don’t have time to ‘work it out’.
An effective business website gives your visitors some clear and obvious directions.
Final words
With a little planning and forethought, your website can do so much more for your business. Ensure that you have these eight website ingredients as a bare minimum;
- Have a domain name that is memorable
- Each page should have one primary purpose
- Have a way to collect email addresses
- Encourage visitors to share your content
- Produce interesting and relevant content
- Give visitors a way to contact you
- Make it legible
- Have a call to action
All the best for you and your business!