Deciding on Your Website Features
One of the fun parts of starting a website is deciding on the features. Similar to defining the purpose of the site, deciding which features of it shows how it will work with you and your visitors to achieve the results you require.
The features you want can determine the technologies you will have to use on your site. This directly affects the next part of our article series, as well as your cost. You don’t need to know how to make these work (that is for your designer and developer), but you need to have a good idea of what you want it to do. The more detailed you can be, the less likely you’ll end up with unsatisfying results.
Here are some things you might want to consider when going over your list of features:
What are the pages you want?
Most websites have the three basic pages: Home, About Us, and Contact. These three pages are then expanded upon by going deeper into information about your company, biographies on those you can contact, and other pages that relate to the organization itself.
Starting with these pages, you can go beyond and think about what you’d like to put on your website to help drive toward its purpose. If you want to sell something online, make sure you have pages that show information on your products. Perhaps you can include testimonials by people who have purchased them. If you are an auto body shop, you may want to include a photo gallery of before and after pictures to show your work. Doctors would be served better by including information on their practice, including what they specialize in and how long they’ve been doing so.
Take a look at what your purpose is, and develop the pages from there. You’ll be able to build a roadmap from them which outlines the structure of your site.
How will people be able to contact you?
There are still a lot of websites out there that haven’t adopted contact forms but instead paste their email address directly on a page for a visitor to retrieve. The trouble with doing that is that spam bots can also pick up your email address, add you to mailing lists and fill your email inbox with reasons you should be using Viagra and switching your home mortgage over to an unknown company.
A contact form takes the place of your email address being posted publicly. Your visitors are able to send you email directly from your website. They don’t need to copy (or write down) your email address, log in to their email service provider, compose their message and send from there. They can save themselves some time by writing their message right there. Your contact form can also be developed to accept files they may need to send.
How will you update your site?
Keeping in mind that regular updates are a good thing, you may want to consider how you’ll be making these updates. Depending on the type of website you have, your updates may be as simple as company news on the front page, or as complex as adding and updating pages of your site from any place you have internet access.
Decide early on as to the level of changes which will need to be made, and on what type of time scale. Are you going to be updating daily, weekly, or monthly? Maybe you’ll only be updating your news once or twice a month but you want to be able to update a links page on your website whenever you feel like it. When you take a look at how much may change on your website, and how often that can happen, you can determine if you’ll need something simple like a small link or news update script, or something bigger like a content management system to cover your whole website.
Will you be selling products on your website?
If you plan to sell products from your website, it’s best to talk to your developer about every aspect of the visitor’s experience. How will they be able to purchase a product? What kind of security will you have in place to make sure the transactions are private? Will you accept credit cards, and if so how will you process them? What about Paypal or Google Checkout? How will you receive the money they send? Will an inventory count need to be updated to display notices on products that are out of stock?
You want your buyers experience to be an easy, no hassle occurrence. Providing an effortless method of shopping will keep your customers happy.
Will users be able to post comments that show up on your website?
Like our website, some allow visitors to post comments on news, blog posts, and articles. This type of interaction can be good. However, you need to know what kind of information you’d like to collect about the visitor. A standard answer to this question would be Name, Email, and comment. Some sites allow website addresses, phone numbers, or city/state to be posted. It all really depends on what you would like.
Other questions you could ask yourself would be related to the aesthetics of the website, how you want it to look and feel. You might want to add some automatic options to your website like instantly checking for available usernames without leaving the page, or forms that fill in certain fields based on other fields (such as selecting United States from a drop down list and a list for States showing up instantaneously) . You might want the header of your site to change on each page load like on SavetheSCC.com.
Make a list of all of the features you’d like your website to have. Once you’re done, go over each of those features and think of ways people will use them or how they will impact the visitor experience. The more detail you can get on how something will work, the easier it will be for the designer and developer to get it on target with your goal. You’ll also be able to get a good idea of what kind of impact it will have on your hosting needs, but that’s what we’re covering tomorrow.
More articles on Starting a Website
Starting a Website - What is the Purpose of Your Website
Starting a Website - Choosing a Domain Name
Starting a Website - Deciding on Your Site Features
Starting a Website - Choosing Web Hosting for Your Website
Starting a Website - Getting the Word Out
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.
- Deciding on Your Website Features
When you decide what you want your website to do, you should look at how you want it to do it. Making out a list of features and how each element will interact with your visitors will make sure they are exactly what you want. - Stop spam with reCAPTCHA
We recommend using reCAPTCHA to prevent spam and post flooding from your website's forum, guestbook, and message board. - What is the Purpose of Your Website?
When you start a website, you need to decide what the purpose of it is. Do you plan to sell items or just present information to potential visitors? The first step to starting a website is defining the purpose of it. - Choosing Web Hosting for Your Website
How can you determine what a good host is? When you're starting a website, you need to find a great web hosting company to host your website for you. In this article we discuss how to determine what kind of hosting you need, and how to decide which host to go with. - Marketing Your Website
How do you plan on letting people know about your website? In this article we discuss ways you can bring in traffic.
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