7 Things Every Company Website Should Include
What elements to include in your company website? This is the first question you should ask yourself before you start designing the site. We’ve shortlisted the following essential elements every business website must have to effectively engage with customers.
What elements to include in your company website? This is the first question you should ask yourself before you start designing the website. Since your company website reflects your company and is the prime source to let your customers know about the goals, mission and services of the company, extra care must be taken in the design process. Poorly designed company website can put a bad impression on your visitors and cause them to leave the website without buying anything or even taking interest in the services you offer. We have shortlisted the following essential elements every business website must have to effectively engage customers.
1. Clearly Define Your Company
Your company description is the first thing a new visitor goes through. A good company description can get the reader’s attention and interest. If you are able to explain what is your company about, what led you to start the company, what are your goals, what services and value you offer and what you hope to accomplish in fewer yet easy to understand words, the chances of visitor’s staying on the site for long increases considerably.
Start with a pitch that shows your excitement and passion about the company. Your goal should be to include all the vital information in a comprehensive way. Once you are done with the draft, have it proofread by someone for possible typos, grammatical or logical errors.
2. Choose an Easy to Remember & Type Web Address
Choose a web address that is easy to remember and easy to type in a web browser or an email address and properly reflects your brand. Ron Wright, the founder of business Web design and online marketing firm Accentix says: “Your domain name is like your brand. It should be easy for a user to type it into a Web browser or an e-mail address.” Choosing a .com domain is always preferable as users are used to typing this extension at the end of a web address. Avoid using dashes and numbers as this makes a web address complicated.
3. Use a Simple Site Map to Easily Navigate Customers
Apart from your home page, visitors may want to navigate to other important pages of your website. To make navigation easier, make sure to include a site map to easily direct customers to what they are looking for. If your visitors are able to easily navigate through your website to gain maximum information, your chances of converting them increase. Site maps are important from SEO point of view also as it provides efficient internal link structure telling search engines how the pages are linked.
4. Include a Prominent Call to Action
You certainly want your visitors to do something after providing them will all the necessary information. For example, if your website is an E-commerce one, you would want them to add products to cart. If you are providing services, you want them to contact you to get a quote or hire you. Your call to action should be placed at a prominent position so that customers know what action you want them to take. Place a large and clear “Add to Cart”, “Buy Now” or “Request for Quote” button and conveniently navigate customers to the final step. As an example, FMEextensions, a web design company, has beautifully done this.
5. Make it Easy for Visitors to Get in Touch With You
How foolish it would be to lose an interested customer by providing contact details that are difficult to find or not providing it at all. Providing easy to find contact details is extremely important as not every customer can wait to click through a series of pages to get to your contact details.
Include your contact information in a prominent place. The best place is the top left or top right corner. It is also a good idea to display it on every page of your website so that customers can get in touch from wherever they want. Another important thing to remember is to provide them more than one ways to contact you i.e. phone, email, chat and contact form.
"One of the biggest mistakes business owners make is to force only one way to reach them," says Wright. Make it a point to enable customers to reach you in a hazard free manner.
6. Write Fresh, Original & Quality Content
A website should primarily be developed and meant for users, not for search engines and your goal must be to give value to your visitors. Content is central to a website’s core features and what sets you apart from other similar sites. Content is the king that gives value to your visitors and has the power to keep them on your website. Highlight important things that you want your potential customers to read in grammatically error-free, easy to understand and beautifully formed words.
Fresh and quality content is not only useful for users, it is extremely important for search engines too. Google gives great weightage to quality content. The more content you have on your site, the more value it offers to visitors and hence Google considers the site as useful and reliable. It’s also a good idea to start a blog on your company website where you can post quality articles relevant to your business or services from time to time. This way, your site will keep getting fresh content and your visitors useful ideas.
7. Get Customer’s Reviews
Positive customer’s reviews about your company establish credibility. When new visitors see these reviews from your old customers, their trust level increases and they are most likely to do business with you with full confidence. More and more business owners now try to get as many reviews as possible with the introduction of Google Places and Google Hotspot.