Various aspects have to be integrated in order to set up a website. The entire world is going online, therefore you can’t afford to remain behind. The first step towards establishing an online presence is getting a website. If you have a business, and you are setting up a business website; you must keep in mind that your website is the online
image of your business. With this basic thought, consider the 9 most essential aspects for setting up a website.
Contact Information
It is essential to have your own name or company name and complete contact details somewhere on your web site, preferably on your contact information page. It is better to give a street address instead of a post office box number. If you want people to find you and do business with you, it is essential to provide the basic information at least. This is a very small and simple thing, however many business owners loose potential customers and thereby sales as this aspect is overlooked.
Content
Content is KING! It is the reason why people visit your website in the first place. There must be impressive content on your website. What is content? For instance if you are selling information, then the data that you have on your website is the content. This might be offered through simple text or through a database of your information that is
organized and searchable.
If you are selling images, video, audio or computer applications then this would be your content. Make sure that these are easy to find, easy to use and the best that can be offered.
Don’t hold back, put your best information forward. If the content on your website is becoming old and stale, you must refresh it with something new, elegant and different. Content is the sole crucial aspect that gives value to your website. Good content would determine the quality of the services/products you provide, so pay special attention to it.
Navigation
The website navigation must enable the people to find out what they are looking for quickly. The most convenient way is to look for simple text based links that are normally the fastest and quickest way to navigate. If the image maps are not too big, they also work very well for navigation. You must take into consideration that people might be willing to spend a lot of time on your website and they may be unimpressed with whiz-bang complex navigation schemes, lot of graphics, and layers of gateway pages to wade through to get to what they want. So, keep it simple and keep it impressive. Your website must be good to look at and at the same time easy to navigate.
Quick Page Load Times
At least for the home page, it is essential to ensure that it loads quickly. Preferably the home page of your website you should not have more than 60 – 80k in graphics, and it should load quickly. If you have added many fancy graphics or other bandwidth-intensive content, and if that is slowing down your website, then you might want to put them on the other pages. Moreover, you must be extremely careful while using any of the audio, video, Java, Java Script, Shockwave, and any other browser plugins. You must take this fact into consideration that people who are not technology savvy may have trouble viewing your web site; therefore design a versatile website that is convenient for all.
Web Hosting
The web hosting platform that you select plays the most essential role when it comes to the functioning of your website. In connection with the earlier point of quick load times, your website will work perfectly if it is supported with necessary web hosting resources like web space, bandwidth and strong servers. Whether your website is new or old, ensuring the uptime of the website is always essential, this can be done through selecting the best web hosting company and an appropriate web hosting plan.
Make Communication Easy
There must be a convenient way through which people can contact you. Even a simple email link works well; you can even have short on-line forms for generating a good response. It may work well as some people like to click on buttons, drop down boxes, etc. Having a live chat on your website also works well. People can contact through live chat and can get any information within a short span of time. Whatever you do, make online communication easy for people; they will surely remember you for this.
Website Promotion
You can say that you have arrived only if people know about your website and they are talking about it. For this, the website promotions strategy needs to be in place. If you have a new website, people will not just come and visit it, you must give them a reason for doing so. Market your website at the right places and drive targeted traffic from there. Big search engines like Google are the best sources for boosting the traffic on your site. Second best source is the link backs from different websites. Good results can be produced from banner ads and ads from email as well. It is a fact that there is no magic formula for getting more traffic to your website. Your approach should be making combinations of several different methods for building traffic to your website. You can also involve people of the organization for promoting the website; you will get many different ideas trough this. It is a fact that promoting the website on the internet is always better rather than using the media (print, TV, radio, etc.) If you are focusing on creating brand recognition, then the print media can be considered. However in the current scenario, even for establishing a brand online promotion is considered to be the most effective strategy as it provides with organic traffic.
Website Appearance
Your website must be legible and it must work well on all the systems. It must be compatible with all the web browsers and all screen resolutions. In case your website is designed on a huge monitor at high resolution, it will greatly hamper the look of the website and it is almost impossible to read such a website on a small monitor at low resolution. Moreover, you must be very careful in terms of using offbeat fonts, sizes, colors, contrasts, and combinations. If you would like to carry out business on your website, simplify it through your website. Also for carrying out online selling transactions, it is preferable if your website looks trustworthy. For this you can get a SSL certificate installed on your website so that people feel free to share their information online.
Customer Information
There must be something on your website through which you can record the email addresses of the visitors to your website. Taking this information will provide you with an opportunity to resell them later. You can send them an informative email for getting them back or you can use the email address for sending follow up emails. There is nothing immoral or unethical about this, as long as it is done responsibly and in the best interest of the customers, it is right.
It does not take much effort to set up an impressive and efficient website. Put all the above mentioned factors together and you will definitely achieve a powerful website that will perfectly portrays your online business success.
