What elements to include on your company website? This is the first question you should ask yourself before you start designing the website. Your company website is often a visitor’s first impression of your company and is a prime source to let your people know about the goals, mission, and services of the company. A poorly designed website can put a less than positive impression on your visitors and cause them to move on without taking an interest in the products or services you offer.
1. Clearly Define Your Company
Your company information is the first thing a new visitor will be drawn to. The more you can describe your business – what it’s about, your passion, your goals, products and services you offer, and the overall value your business has to offer, the better your chances of a visitor staying on the site and contacting you.
2. Choose an Easy to Remember and Easy to Type Web Address
Choose a web address that is easy to remember and easy to type in a web browser and properly reflects your brand. Choosing a .com domain is always preferable over other extensions as users are used to typing this at the end of a web address. Avoid using dashes and numbers as this makes a web address more complicated than it needs to be.
3. Use Simple Navigation to Make it Easy for 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 menus to easily direct customers to what they are looking for and possibly a search option. If your visitors can easily navigate through your website to gain the information they are interested in, your chances of converting them to customers increase.
4. Include a Call to Action
The goal when a visitor lands on your site is to have them do something once they’ve browsed through all the necessary information. For example, if your website is an E-commerce site, the goal would be to have them add products to a shopping cart. If you are providing services, you want them to contact you or to request a quote. Your call to action (CTA) should be placed at a prominent position, or multiple positions 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.
5. Make it Easy for Visitors to Contact You
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, like headers and footers of every page. Another important thing to remember is to provide them more than one way to contact you, such as by phone, email, chat and contact form.
6. Write Original & Relevant 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 sites. Content is the king that gives value to your visitors and has the power to keep them on your website – give them a reason to stick around.
Original and relevant content is not only useful for users, but it is also extremely important for search engines too. Google gives a great deal of weight to quality content. The more content you have on your site, the more value it offers to visitors and hence Google considers the site useful, reliable, and relevant. It’s also a good idea to start a blog on your company website where you can post articles relevant to your business or services.
7. Get Customer’s Reviews and/or Testimonials
Positive customer reviews about your company establish credibility. When new visitors see these reviews from your previous or existing customers, their trust level automatically increases, and they are most likely to do business with you.