When thinking about your website for your new start up venture. Before talking to your friendly web designer, consider the following web essentials that you really should integrate with your website.
Website Analytics
How successful is your new website? Are the right people getting to it? How many unique visitors do you receive each day? When someone visits your website, how long do they spend on it and what is the page that normally makes them leave? What is the most popular page on your website? Are people getting to your website purely through search engines, or also through some kind of advertising campaign? If so how many are due to the advertising program?
Wouldn't you like to know all the answers to these questions? Trust me the answer is yes. A good developer will know how to easily integrate services like Google Analytics into your website, by doing so you can receive monthly or weekly emails with all this information attached.
Analytics are an awesome way to see how your online presence is progressing. It's an immediate popularity indicator. If the numbers are low, don't panic there are things you can do like setting up an advertising campaign or refining the SEO (search engine optimization). Again your developer should be able to handle these things. Personally, I like to offer my clients managed advertising campaigns and SEO enhancement packages, and I know that many developers offer similar things.
Analytics are a must. Put it this way; if you're not receiving much interest through your website (whether it be sales or clients or whatever it is you are trying to attract), is it because nobody is getting to you website, or is your website actually very popular but there is some other reason stopping people from going through with the sale? This fundamental question simply cannot be answered without the feedback from analytic services.
A Contact Form
Most people these days expect to see some way of easily contacting the owner of the website. The most secure way of doing this is through a contact form. The reason why it is more secure than just shoving your email address on there is because you won't get so much spam mail (your email address is hidden). It should be a simple form, just with the bare minimum of boxes such as what I have on my contact form. If people can't contact you then they probably won't trust you and more to the point will have no way of communicating with you. You definitely need a contact form.
A Blog About your start-up service
This may or may not be relevant to you but adding a blog to your website is a great way to help build up your business for the following reasons...
- It will help establish you as an expert in your particular niche or area. The fact that you can talk around the subject will show that you are knowledgeable, which really helps people trust in you.
- Its a chance to show your personality. Websites offering a product or service are generally concise and to the point (or at least they should be), people are looking for fast information and answers to their needs. A blog, however, can offer a more colloquial style - a way for the customers to relate to you and your venture.
- It will help boost your traffic! A frequently updated website is more likely to appear high in the Google rankings. Also, the more you talk about the subject matter, the more relevant keywords, pages and content you are generating for Google to get it's teeth into. This means it's more likely for a customer to stumble upon your website whilst searching.
- It gives customers a reason to keep coming back. If they are interested in what you have to say, they will return to read your next interesting post. Return customers are undoubtedly the corner stone of any successful business.
PayPal Or Google Checkout
If you are selling a product or service which can be paid for instantly, you should consider adding in a PayPal Buy It Now button or a Google Checkout Button/shopping cart. These methods of payments are well known to internet users and most people know that they are hassle free, secure and fast. This will convert more people to sales, if people know that all they have to do is click a button to buy something it is much more tempting than if that have to fill out some long form or worse still send a cheque. Make it easy for them.
Adding simple Buy It Now options are pretty simple for a good developer to set up so aren't costly at all. Google Checkout is my method of choice because it has a lovely online interface for you to process your sales etc. Very easy to use. Also, if you use an invoicing service like FreshBooks then Google Checkout (and PayPal) integrate nicely, giving your clients a simple way to pay you, and a great way for you to monitor and track your sales and keep a firm grasp on your accounts .
Conclusion
None of the above listed items cost very much at all to integrate (or at least they shouldn't) with your new website but they are all key players in the success of your start-up company or venture. Be sure to mention them when discussing your needs with whoever designs your website for you.