As long-time marketers ourselves, we know that our industry is notorious for putting a shiny button on everything and calling it VITAL! or the SECRET! to online success.
But here’s the big secret – there is NO one big secret.
Instead, there are key essentials that ensure that your business website will be set up to succeed for the long run.
Now whether it ACTUALLY succeeds is another story. That tale of promotion, hard work and vigilance is for another time.
For now, let’s focus on the foundation. If your website “nuts and bolts” basics are solidly in place, you’re online business presence stands a much better chance of returning the investment on all your hard work.
So that’s what I’ll be covering today – the 10 key essentials every business website should get right.
There Are Two Sides To Every Website
Before we start, I have to backtrack a bit. There are no big secrets…but there are some hidden factors that can be overlooked.
The factors are a part of the two sides to building a good website: the visible and the invisible.
By “visible,” I’m referring to the elements your customer can see when he visits your site. These are things like graphic design, fonts and images—the things that make your site attractive and easy to use.
By “invisible,” I mean all those technical details that make your site secure, fast and easy to find by search engines like Google. A website visitor doesn’t see these invisible factors. However, these are the things which ensure your site will function properly, be secure from hacking, and protect customer information among other factors.
So let’s take a look at the ten features, seen and unseen, that your website must have in order to compete:
1. Clear, Easy-To-Read Graphics
If a website tries to get too clever with colors and typefaces, the result can be a confusing jumble of shapes, headlines and disorienting colors. In a stellar example of “How Not to Do It,” one artist’s website consisted only of 50 city snapshots – each tilted at a different dizzying angle. To top it off, there were no links to help you learn anything about the artist. Too creative to serve any purpose.
2. Contact Forms & Phone Numbers
This is just common sense. However, all too often they’re forgotten about. If people arrive on your website, they may want to buy from you immediately or may have a question about products or services. No matter what page of your website they’re on, it should be easy to figure out how to contact you. It baffles me when companies wanting to sell products and services bury their contact information in tiny print at the bottom of the page.
3. Site Content Suitable For The Type Of Business
Every company needs to emphasize different information that is quickly accessible to users. For example, a dentist’s website should display his location, hours, services and specialties. The phone number should be prominently displayed. A restaurant had better make its menu front and center, along with hours of operation, location and plenty of mouth-watering images of food to make you hungry. A stadium or theater must make it very easy to buy tickets and find the schedule of events.
4. It Must SELL The Business, Product Or Service
This SHOULD go without saying, but many businesses go limp right here. The content should emphasize the unique benefits of the product or service in the clearest, most compelling manner possible. There must be direct “calls to action” to make visitors decide to act now, and it should be effortless for a person to buy, call or otherwise contact the company.
5. Fast Loading Time
The length of time that it takes for your website to appear once a visitor enters your address is called the “loading time.” Many visitors may never discover how long it takes your site to load. Why? Because in two or three seconds, they’re likely to be gone already and thus won’t even be there for the unveiling. Consumers expect a website to load almost instantly and loading time is vital for a website’s success. How the site is built and the choice of website host are two key factors here.
6. Secure
Websites and often the information we enter on them is at risk from ill-intentioned individuals. But there are basic ways to keep sites secured such as updating the software, installing fixes to known security issues as soon as they are released, not using obvious or easy-to-crack passwords and so on.
As with site loading speed, the choice of website host can also directly influence your site’s security. Luckily, it doesn’t take complicated or expensive hosting to do so. The real cost is losing a site and business opportunities, to an attack.
7. Good Website Hosting and Backups
Every website is “hosted” somewhere—meaning that it’s stored on a computer that is hooked up to the Internet. That hosting service you use makes a difference. Think of a time you used an old “on its way out” computer that was slogging along and couldn’t open a simple program vs. that new system that could zip around like a sports car and deliver fast results.
If your website is on slow, inefficient hosting, your website visitor is on that old, crappy computer…and they’re not happy about that.
The good website hosts go the extra mile to ensure websites are secure, doing things behind the scenes to help keep the bad guys out. And even if the site does get compromised, it’s vital to have backups in place so you can quickly get your online presence back up.
So your site needs to be fast, reliable, and secure. Web hosts are not equal. Any additional money spent, usually less than a dollar extra per day, on top website hosting is invariably recouped in saved time, money, effort and stress.
8. On Site Search Engine Optimization
The best web developers know how to construct your site so it satisfies the requirements of major search engines. The top keywords related to your industry need to appear in the right places and in the right way. The headlines and subheads need to be just right and there are snippets of other information and behind-the-scenes code that search engines look for so they can categorize your content correctly. They’re also going to judge your site for relevance – so if you restore classic cars, they’re going to expect you to talk about chrome, paint, primer, engine overhauls, carburetors and white sidewalls. You can’t fool search engines anymore. You have to follow the rules and be authentic.
9. Mobile Responsive
Mobile responsive websites are sites that adapt seamlessly to phone, tablet or desktop browsers. They are easy to use on any device. Just because your website can be seen on a mobile browser, doesn’t make it mobile friendly. Desktop only sites on mobile phones are usually small and hard to read and navigate.
The advantages to businesses making mobile-friendly websites are huge. As of this year, Google confirmed there are more searches on mobile web devices than desktop. Additionally, Google announced it’s preference for mobile-friendly websites. That means they are likely to rank a mobile website higher than a comparable desktop-only website, just because it is mobile-friendly.
Business websites need to adapt to smartphones or tablets. It can easily be done while keeping vital features. Check out major sites like apple.com or disney.com and see how seamlessly they migrate from desktop to smartphone. Beautiful.
10. Design and User Friendliness
The design and user-friendliness of a website is not an afterthought.
Here’s a bottom line example: A Dallas real estate agency website was clunky, but they figured “it worked” so why change it? The problem is they didn’t know how much better it could be. When their website crashed after their existing marketing company botched it, we brought it back online quickly – with a new updated design and easy-to-use structure.
The results were astonishing to them. Their old site was crippling their business and they had NO idea:
Overall website traffic doubled, from 4,000 per month to over 8,000
Mobile traffic more than tripled, from 1,200 to over 4,500
Sure, it’s “easier” to leave it alone. Design can wander easily into too many opinions. But before it gets that far, there are facts like the above.
A clean, attractive and easy-to-use website can invigorate a business!
Excellence is a requirement
On that note, let’s talk about excellence.
This list is what it takes to create an excellent site. Being competitive today means far more than having an “adequate” website. It means being on top of the continuous updates and changes of this industry. It means demanding the best in security, functionality and design.
At Target Public, we don’t settle for anything less for our clients. We are absolutely relentless in our quest for excellence.
If this fits in with your philosophy, then we should talk about your website.
Contact us for a consultation and let’s see if we can bring your website up to the excellence you deserve.
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