5 Must Haves for Any Business Website

List of 5 Things Every Business Website Should Have

No matter what your business is, how big or how small it may be, there are some things that every business website should have. This is a list of 5 necessary elements of every business website. Check the list against your web site to find out if you've got the 5 keys of a basic business website.

I’m lost! Give me a Map!

Your website should not be difficult to navigate. If there is one thing that kills website traffic and increases bounce rate, it’s terrible navigation. You want your website to be easy to use, and if your visitors can’t find their way around, you will lose them quickly.

Tip: Keep your website navigation simple. It should be easy for your visitors to get to the information or products you sell in the least amount of clicks.

Tip: Create a sitemap to make locating everything easy. Use your sitemap as a custom 404 page so if someone ends up on a broken link on your domain, they can easily find their way around. Using an XML sitemap can help search engines index your website.

Contact Information +Form

Contact information is a must have for every website. Your visitors may need to be able to get in touch with you for any number of reasons, most likely being information about your products and services. It is vital that you keep up to date contact information on your site.

Tip: Add a contact form to your site. A contact form will allow your visitors to email you directly from your site without having to use their own email service. I am much more likely to contact someone through a form on their site than to copy their email, launch Outlook, paste the email in and write my message. Convenience is a wonderful thing, and people enjoy having it.

Updates that are Up-to-Date

Keep your site up to date. If you have a news section on your site whose last update is 8 years ago, you have a problem. Visitors notice out of date news, and it put a negative outlook on your business.

Make sure your news is up to date. When you have a new product or service, let everyone know. Failing to inform your customer base of your latest services and products can spiral your business downward.

Tip: If you have a static website, use a blog to keep the news current. Staying up to date with new information is also a good search engine optimization tactic.

Good Code Works Better

As a business owner, you want your customers to be able to see your website the same. You want them to be able to interact with it using their browser of choice. It is necessary that your website is coded using web standards. Invalid code can cause problems for visitors and search engines, so you should always make sure your website is coded properly. If you can't code a website, make sure your web designer is using valid code.

Tip: To test your website for code issues, visit the W3C and paste your website address into the search box. It will test your website for errors and either returns a Green for valid code or a Red for invalid code. If you have several pages in your website, use the multipage validation tool by WDG.

A Purpose

Every website needs a purpose. Some websites sell products. Maybe your website’s purpose is simply to let others know about the services you offer. Your website needs a reason to exist; otherwise it can lack any real chance of standing out and gaining business for you.

Tip: Define your website’s purpose. Write down on paper exactly what you’d like your website to do. Once you’ve decided its purpose, you and your webmaster can plan out and design a great site that has a much better chance of achieving your goals.

About Dave

I am the founder of Asheboro Creative. I'm a PHP and MySQL developer that thinks CSS is the greatest thing since the knife that sliced bread. I am a stickler for validating our websites and love to check out design galleries.