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There is no denial of the fact that every business today has a website or at least a minimalist web presence. Is it solving it's purpose?
There is a two fold purpose of having a website
- To grow your business by bringing people looking for the kind of products and services you offer to your website.
- To facilitate people visiting your site including customers, partners, clients, employees to get relevant information with ease.
However, the challenge is to get this whole deal right.
This article covers a list of elements which are absolutely must haves for any business website. So, when you finalize on the website development company, ensure that all these are incorporated.
Relevant Domain Name
We all want a domain name as close as possible to our business / company name. For instance, if companyname.com is unavailable, try companynameindia.com or companynameltd.com and so on. Better still, check for availability in .IN, .CO.IN, .ORG, .NET and .BIZ. Get it registered for a longer period like 5 years / 10 years and eliminate the possibility of missing out on yearly renewals. Also ensure that the email address you specify is the one you regularly check.
Reliable Webhosting Company
Choose a reliable webhosting company from numerous service providers available.
Professional Email IDs
Email address from a free provider like Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail etc is an absolute no-no on your business card as well as on your business website.
Content Management System
You should not be dependent on the website developer for minor changes in content or updating of the website. The solution is going for a Content Management System (CMS). The objective of getting a CMS is to have administration panel that lets you easily control and manage the content on your web site. There are loads of both open source and paid CMS systems available in the market.
Sitemap
A sitemap is a must have for two reasons. One, the visitor can see the entire website structure and figure out exactly here to find the page he is looking for. The second reason is that a sitemap is crucial in making your website easily searchable and index able by the search engines.
Alerts and notifications
If your business website goes down even for a minute, you should know about it. Server monitoring services do exactly this at specified intervals from locations across the world. You can receive SMS, email etc when a problem arises.
Analytics
It is highly recommended to have an application collect analytics of your website. Google Analytics is easy to setup and you can be up and active in minutes. The service gives you an overview of the visitors to your site and you can drill down to get more details including where the visitors came from and what led them there and so on.
Regular backups
It is important to have regular back up of your website. This ensures that if there is a crash of the server or some other problem, you have your data and files saved and you can restore your website quickly.
Information Pages
- About Us
This section will provide information about the company, its business, key people, and promoters. This helps in increasing the credibility of the business. It is also healthy to have some pictures of the company’s physical offices and also of the key people.
- Contact Form
The purpose of having a contact form on the website is to have easy and quick way for any visitor to get in touch with you.
Form can let you segregate messages by the nature of the contact. You can have these queries sent to relevant departments or personnel in the company. It is also important that contact form captures all necessary details like contact person name, contact number, email address, postal address etc.
It is highly recommended that any contact made through a contact form sends out an automated response to the person contact you. This message acknowledges that their message has been received and will be looked into by relevant people.
- Clients, partners and affiliates
With billions of websites out there in same or similar business as yours it is important to showcase who are your clients, partners and affiliates that you have for your business.
- Testimonials and reviews
While providing a list of clients, partners and affiliates bring in credibility to the business to an extent, posting testimonials and reviews of customers, partners, affiliates, clients ensures that credibility is complete.
- Locations
This page should have postal address of your company and any branches of your company, and any branches that the company has. This brings credibility to the website, as to being a website of a genuine business. Along with the address, it is desirable to put up phone numbers, fax numbers and directions map.
Frequent content updates
Frequent content updates show that the website is alive, not just to the visitors but to the search engines too.
- Latest promotions and offers
- Press Releases and media coverage
- Latest News and Blogs
When we say that the content should be frequently updated, it includes getting rid of expired offers, promotions, changing content in the company information page etc. No one appreciates visiting a website that as last updated months or years back. Things change in business, and these changes should be reflect4ed in your website. And remember we went for a CMS so that we can update the website frequently and easily!
Social media integration
It is social media crazy world out there. Almost everyone out there is a member of atl east one of the most popular social/business networking websites, be it facebook, orkut, twitter, or linkedin. It only makes sense that you have a mechanism in place on you website so that a visitor can broadcast information from your website to his or her friends and followers. In addition to this there are websites which help in promoting information from your website to the world. So go ahead and Integrate social media onto the website.
Newsletters
They are typically sent out to subscribers containing news, updates, promotions etc. This is yet another element to propagate content to subscribers. By having a newsletter subscription mechanism in place, a visitor who is interested in getting updates from your company can enlist himself in the mailing list.
Syndication
This is to enable visitors to pull content from your website to a program they prefer – without visiting your web site. These feeds will be read through RSS readers or email clients.
Graphics and photo gallery
Having a dedicated photo gallery makes your website look interesting and informational. A photo gallery showcasing your products, services or demos of your products would add to the informational appeal of your website.
Downloads
Provide visitors with Takeaways ! You could provide download of whitepapers, case studies, manuals, guides, how-to and other such literatures related to your products and services. You could also design some wallpapers with your business name or logo or product photos which the visitor can download and set on his desktop.
Secure payment gateway
If you intend to sell products and services online, you need to have a secure payment gateway. You can tie-up with a bank to integrate a payment gateway on you website or use one of the popular ones like Paypal. We can help you identify and integrate the most suitable payment gateway for your needs.
Security
Last but not the least, is optimal security for the website. It is important that you get the web developer to get the website audited for security loop holes and patch any loop holes found.
Let us help you derive maximum benefit from your online presence.
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