Reality checklist for what to put on your website
Do you wonder why you can’t get traffic to your website? Or have you decided to build your own website using an online template? Or are you working with an inexperienced web designer? Maybe you’ve decided that you can cut costs by writing the content yourself.
Then at least give it your best shot by ensuring that you can tick a ‘yes’ next to each of these items before your website goes live. Here is a checklist for what a basic working website needs:
- Five pages of information – Home, About Us, Services/Products, Articles, Contact Us
- Keyword research for SEO
- All pages written to be SEO- and Adwords-friendly
- A home page that provides enticing entry points for all the journeys that the user can take through the site
- Simple and clear navigation to make it easy for the user to find information
- A strong positioning statement at the top of the home page (i.e. a clear explanation of what your company does)
- Contact telephone and e-mail prominent at the top of each page
- Content that presents your offering as irresistible and compelling
- All the most important information on each page to sit above the fold (i.e. you shouldn’t have to scroll down to find it)
- Stay away from banners that take up most of the space above the fold.
- Authentic testimonials
- Prominent calls to action on each page
- Regular new, original content (which is why you need a page for articles/news/a blog/projects)
- A contact request form that is automatically e-mailed to you
- Contact details from request forms automatically stored in a back-end data base
- A Google+ account to which you should link the articles that you publish on the website, as this is how you can build your reputation with Google as the author of quality content
- A content management system (CMS) on relevant pages, so that you can upload articles, news, testimonials, etc. yourself
- Keyword rich text on every page, as Google can’t read images
- No fast-moving flash images – they have been proven to be irritating and distracting
- No images that take more than a few seconds to open
