A website is the home of your company. It needs to convey your message properly to your visitors. All business websites needs to have certain elements to be successful. I’ve broken it down to my list of 10 essential elements needed for a website. All websites should have the following:

A. WOW factor
B. Be clean and professional
C. Have a clear call to action
D. Contact information
E. FAQ and/or help section
F. Industry terminology section
G. Credible and professional copywriting
H. Updating information
I. Email/newsletter sign up
J. Theme that focuses on their overall brand’s image and core values.

1. WOW Factor
Let’s start with the “WOW factor”. Something about the company, the logo, website design, and how it all ties together has to make a definite impact on your visitors and give a lasting impression that keeps your website in their mind. The ultimate goal of every website is to inform, sell, and support a product or service. A great “WOW factor” can give you is buzz and create word of mouth, what we call viral marketing.

It can be simply the way your website is designed, or the simplicity of your message that can be a WOW factor. When brainstorming the name for our Internet marketing company we needed a name that was easily memorable, easily write able and pronounceable, and created a mystery and curiosity about the company; “What does that company do?” is what we wanted from people in the beginning.

Out of that environment the name “Karma Snack” was then born. We’ve talked to hundreds of clients and visitors and they all stated out of the blue they love the “Karma Snack” name. It’s sticks with them in meetings and even long after their encounter with us.

We had one client state that of all the Internet marketing companies he talked to, he only remembers the “Karma Snack” name. When we heard that, we knew we were onto something.

In all our marketing efforts from the way the Karma Snack’s comic book Logo, to the website design, and now recently launched redesign we incorporate a WOW factor to grab the visitors attention. Your company’s website need a WOW factor, something that separates you from the competition, and give you an edge.

2. Clean and Professional
A professional website has to be clean and “professional”. Make sure all of your web pages are complete, coherent, and have a clear call you action on what you want your visitor to do next. The flow of your website has to lead a visitor to the end result of either buying a product, filling out a form, or picking up the phone to call to order your product or service. Professionalism is needed at every level.

There is professionalism and then corporate tight-asses. I’m not talking about necessarily having a corporate tight-ass look. It really depends on your industry and what you can get away with. Some industries like banks cannot get away with much in terms of creativity, but then there are websites like rock bands for example, that need the flair and need to create the in your face experience. But that rock band still needs to be professional. They need to sell CD and tour tickets, so they need mandatory things like a payment gateway, and a place to buy their music, whether it is on iTunes or Amazon.

A big thing about being professional with your website is not to have any of these “Under Construction” or “Coming Soon” web pages. If you don’t have content or a feature, REMOVE IT. Imagine if you turn on your computer and have bought an additional monitor to create a dual monitor setup, then plug in your new monitor, and on the screen it pops up “Dual monitor support COMING SOON”. Unless you have a firm launch date for something, “coming soon” could be tomorrow, or 2 years from now. Remove those “under construction” and “coming soon” pages until they are actually here, that way you don’t piss off your current visitors.

3. Clear Call To Action
Having a clear call to action is crucial for a website. If you have a product or service you want new visitors for, you need to lay out in layman’s terms exactly what you want visitors to do. It sounds simple and easy, but you will be surprised as to how many websites there are that have visitors circling their web pages without clear directions.

Use visible and contrasting colors to get the attention of clear call to actions. For example, if you’re website is predominately red, use a blue button for your call to action so users can focus on it. Write clear directive content, “click here to request a proposal/quote”, “fill out our form on the left hand side”, “Contact Us today at 305.397.8088 to request a free website analysis”.

Images speak a thousand words, when creating a call to action, try to have a visual image that will also mentally send the message of what is suppose to happen once on the page. An example is on your contact page where you have a form to fill out, have an image of a person that would be in your targeted audience on a computer filling out a form. That will get the “picture” across.

Remember you website is being built to attract new visitors, people that have never been on your website before, or many be new to the Internet altogether. If a brand new visitor goes to your website, they need to be able to find out more information about your company, contact you, and learn about your services, easily and effortlessly. Clean navigation is a big key here.

4. Generous Contact Information
Have you ever gone to a website and really wanted to buy a product, but the website didn’t have a contact phone number, and when exploring the website further you can’t find anything about the company, it’s physical location, who runs the company, or anything. With all of the horror stories you hear about people being robbed online or they gave their credit card information and never got the product in the back of your mind, are you more or less likely to buy that product you where looking for from that website?

Most people are looking for a reason not to do business with you; everyone is skeptical, especially online. Putting your contact information, your physical location – if possible, and maybe a photo of your team, helps people feel at easy with whom they are doing business with. Put a friendly face behind your website.

There are certain standards that each industry has to contact them, use those and improve upon them. If for example most people only take email forms of communication in your industry, do that as well as create an online form for people to fill out and place your contact phone number there as well. Take that extra step to give the appearance that you are more accessible than your competition.

The one thing I always do for an e-commerce websites is put a phone number to customer support on every page. Now that doesn’t mean I necessary want them to call customer support, but it give potential shoppers a great piece of mind to see a phone number there. The majority of people will buy more products on a website when it has a phone number on every page versus a number on only the contact us page. These are small things that add up to create a better psychological user experience.

5. FAQ and/or Help section
Every product or service provider knows there are key questions most potential customers ask. Having a section on your website answering these questions help you avoid answering repetitive questions.

Since they are also common questions, people are most likely searching for them online using a search engine as well. People that you probably aren’t marketing to, but since you have A FAQ section, and your website is search engine friendly, now will come to your website looking for answers to their questions. Need I say more?

Another interesting thing about certain types of web visitors is they will visit a website several times over and over when it is their first time in the marketing for a particular product or service and read the same information over and over to absorb it, before making a decision. To these people the FAQ is a gold mine. This characteristic in shoppers does turn out to be a great thing though; they become more loyal of a customer once you get them.

Make sure you also update your FAQs on a monthly basis, Add new questions, and elaborate more on an old question in case there is new information or you find out something is still not clear. Also, a good thing is to add a date that it was recently updated to in the section. This give the visitors piece of mind that you maintain your website and are constantly following up.

6. Industry Terminology Section
Industry specific terms exist for each niche and market sectors. New customers or clients may not be aware of them, and having your own “dictionary” of industry specific terms will help clients understand your industry’s overall message.

Another great advantage for search engine optimization is that simply having these terms on your website will also help increase traffic to your website from the search engine. You may have the perfect definition for a particular industry phrase/term that visitors can understand, and when The big G (Google), sees that several hundreds of visitors are going to your terms and staying in that section for minutes at a time, they will understand that you have something valuable to offer, in return send you even more traffic. Search engines will also have a better understanding of what it is that you exactly offer, and will in turn send to you better more high targeted traffic.

Having an industry terms section also helps people not feel foolish for not knowing or understanding something you said or wrote in an article. That gives them better piece of mind and creates an almost unbreakable bond with your brand, since you are teaching them about new things.

7. Credible and Professional Copywriting
A copywriter should professionally write all of your web pages’ content. It needs to sound credible, and the overall message needs to be consistent within all of your web pages. Nothing is worse to a potential customer than reading text that is grammatically incorrect or even misspelled.

There are some great books that I gathered in my time on marketing like “Words That Sell”, “More Words That Sell”, “Hypnotic Writing”, that I suggest everyone pick up if you are serious about sell your services. These books have become ingrained into all of my marketing efforts and have helped my clients make hundreds of millions dollars while doing marketing with me.

8. Updating Information
In order to survive online your website needs to have updating information. Either create a company blog that is updated 2 to 3 times a week, an article section that you give advice and information about your industry and products, a company news section that talks strictly about the company’s happenings, a press releases section used for special press releases to media outlets, an industry news section that informs visitors on what is going on generally in your industry, a tips and trick section for your product or service, or an active forum to have more informal communication with your visitors and ask any questions they may have. Any one or all of these ideas can be considered a part of your updating information.

The biggest thing is to get traffic flowing to your website, and the best way is to have new information on your website. Daily updates are the best, but setting realistic goals of twice or 3 times a week to start is better. Just stay consistent. After 2 months of this you will no doubt have seen a huge increase in website traffic, sales, leads, and phone calls. Keep it Going!

9. Email/Newsletter
“Grow your list!” – that’s what marketers have been preaching since before the Internet went mainstream. Your list of prospects is the key to your survival in good times, and especially in bad. The Internet has made it easier to create a newsletter list that you can email visitors about updates, special promotions, and send our company news or press releases. It is important to keep your brand fresh in their minds, and constantly growing your list is important. I’ve assembles industry specific databases of millions of double opt-in emails for clients that have allowed them to stay in constant communication with their clients and potential customers.

For a website simply having a newsletter signup on every page, or at the end of your articles pages is going to be key to increasing your marketing share and creating more loyal visitors.

10. Branding
Your Brand is the most important thing your company has. Your website should reflect your company’s core values and it should be inline with your “mission statement” and business objectives. Remember your website is a 24 hour 7 days a week representation and sales agent for your company.

Every image you display, the way your content reads to your visitors, and everything you do is all a part of your branding efforts. Get familiar with key marketing terms like brand equity, brand loyalty, and marketing metrics to better understand how to engage your audience with your brand.

Conclusion
I touched on a lot of subjects here lightly, and plan on re-touching each subject more in-depth on the future. There are still several other factors that I did not touch on traffic measuring tools, on-site search engines that I think are a major part of a great website. I plan on talking about this and more in-depth in future articles postings.

Make sure to bookmark this page so you can keep coming back to and referring to it when creating your company’s website. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave a comment or contact me and I will be more than happy to help you out. I read all comments and make sure to answer back. Thanks for reading – Adelard Gasana.

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