If you are looking to start your website or simply add some features, there are a number of products available for your website design that you can choose from. Knowing the importance of each of these products for the betterment of your site may be a challenge. Below are eight of these products that are offered with each website package and their descriptions.
- Contact Form
- Images
- Custom Favicon
- Social Media
- Hosting
- Slider
- Mobile Responsive
As a professional business, communicating with clients using a yahoo, Gmail or any public email service account is and may be viewed as unprofessional. This is where the use of domain emails comes in.
Depending on how big your company is, it is possible to generate multiple email addresses such as jobs@{your company}.com, info@{your company}.com and sales@{your company}.com for the various departments and also including personal employee addresses like name@{your company}.com.
On opening a website, most service providers offer web packages where you automatically get a free domain email with unlimited storage. For businesses without websites, there are also special packages that enable you to set up your domain email.
The importance of domain emails include:
• Domain emails present a company as organized and professional to the customers. This is because a client is able to tell that the entity invested money and time in setting up their website and the emails thus they are to be taken seriously.
• Domain names create email identity. Communication with suppliers or consumers is made easier as your company is easily recognizable just from the email address.
• Domain emails still enable you to access your old emails as you can easily import your contacts and old emails to the new domain email account.
Contact Form
Having a contact form on your website is beneficial when dealing with customers and any other visitors on your site particularly for feedback or query purposes. A contact form has two parts; html file that has the form and the script (which may be asp, perl or php) which is where the information is processed to send the email.
The benefits of including a contact form in your site design are:
To receive feedback either complaints, suggestions, queries or corrections from clients regarding your website.
Use of contact forms enables storage of messages in a log file or database on the server for future reference. This is useful as sometimes client emails get caught by spam filters or in case your email crashes, all data will be safe. Use of contact forms, therefore, ensures no incoming message is ever lost.
Using contact forms it is possible to detect information like the browser and OS information of the clients, referrals and even the IP address of the sender. An IP address can help you know the country of the sender which having to disturb the client for further details.
With all these details, it is possible to market your services or products better in the future in addition to offering better customer services and even customized offers.
Moreover, using your logs to access visitor information can help find sources of any intimidating or attack emails sent to you.
With contact forms, you can add subscription functions where a visitor to your site can check under your “sign me up for a newsletter” option on the contact form.
Contact forms allow for real-time detection of any messages sent and therefore you can automate a response.
Custom Favicon
A favicon, known in full as a favorite icon, is the small image display that appears on the left of URLs for most of the modern web browsers. The display is a 16×16-pixel image and it may also be displayed next to the name of a site if it is bookmarked. A custom favicon therefore, means having your business icon, colors or logo displayed as the image next to your website URL. For websites where no custom favicon is installed, a blank square is displayed next to the URL instead.
Therefore, having your custom favicon for your website design is quite necessary because:
The website appears more credible and professional as a favicon shows attention to detail and leaves the client with the impression of a complete website. Although it is a small addition, it will build a customer’s trust in the professionalism of your website.
A favicon is a way to reinforce your brand. By getting your icon, logo or colors out into an additional web location, your business, band gets better exposure and becomes more recognizable to a customer.
Most importantly, favicons make a site more user-friendly. Most people use tabbed browsers and therefore your custom favicon appears on the tab next to the page title instead of an empty square, thus it is more identifiable and thus better brand reinforcement. Therefore, for a user with multiple open tabs, it is easier for them to return to your website as they can simply recognize your site from the favicon displayed on the tab rather than opening every single tab trying to find it.
Social Media
For the promotion of your online presence, it is paramount that your website and social media go hand in hand. Therefore, by integrating your social media channels and using them correctly, the visibility of your website is increased. In the design of your site, you have the option of choosing to place social sharing buttons on the pages that have content that is shareable making it easier for visitors on your website to share them.
In your website design stage, you are also required to choose the social media platforms that would work perfectly for your business and on your site. These popular platforms include Facebook, Instagram, Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, YouTube, Pinterest and many others.
By sharing a wide range of content through social media, you increase the visibility of your site as different content attracts different followers and with each share, tag, like, view and retweet, you are more likely to attract more traffic to your site thus more business.
Some of the content known to attract most people includes;
Quotes and other content by famous and respected persons in the world.
Sharing innovative and creative concepts and designs
Sharing of funny images, quotes, and other content.
Sharing of valuable links and information.
Most importantly, endorsing and advertising products, services or companies.
It is therefore important to take time to carefully design or create your content to make it as attractive as possible to get the maximum effect and benefits from your social media marketing efforts.
Hosting
A service provider that provides storage space on a remote computer server for your website files and media is referred to as a host. All websites, therefore, require web hosting services that have to be paid so as to get storage space on the servers.
It is paramount that you choose a reputable web hosting company to avoid storage complications and website failures. Hosting is as a result, one of the main things to be keenly planned when designing your site.
Hosting goes hand in hand with communication. All domain emails and client feedback from your contact forms are stored in the servers provided by your host.
Your website host affects the marketing for your website. This is because the better the website host, the better your results will be on the search engine.
Most importantly, your web host is your digital lifeline. If your host is down, this also means your site will be down and thus no business.
Hosting determines the downtime. This refers to times when your site in not accessible to clients, usually lasting from some seconds to several hours. A reputable host comes with minimal to zero downtime. Always being accessible to clients makes your site reputable and increases your traffic immensely.
For large sites, your host ought to be able to handle huge traffic at once without hanging or overloading the systems.
Having a great host eliminates most of all of the above issues and your website runs smoothly all the time.
Mobile Responsive
This refers to the design of a website that is accessible on PCs, smartphones, tablets and any other devices. This is essential, especially with the growth in the portable device industry so that your clients can access a mobile-friendly site from any device, anytime, and anywhere. A responsive website is therefore, a major consideration to be made when designing your website.
With the multiple apps, games and social media marketing, it is important that prospective clients are able to immediately view a user-friendly site from their mobile devices on running into information or advertisements for your site. This will greatly increase your traffic and business. Remember that over 60% of all online shopping is done on mobile devices.
Google’s approach to ensuring increased development of mobile, responsive web design is better search rankings for mobile-friendly sites. This is because they give better user experiences. Rankings also vary on phone and computer, so to stay on top, it is better to have a responsive site.
Instead of redirecting users to a mobile version of your website, a responsive site will adapt accordingly depending on the device thus a relevant site layout.
With increasing technology, it is better to be ahead of the game. New devices like smart watches and google glass among others are the future. A responsive site is therefore, the best way to ensure maximum traffic from any device and not cut some people out.
Slider
Use of sliders is an attractive web design trend provided it is properly implemented. This refers to the displaying content featured on your site using image or photo sliders on the homepage. It is one of the best ways to include images on your website and make it attractive, inviting and colorful.
Reasons to include a slider in your web design are multiple:
Sliders give a unique, creative and stylish feel to your site.
It immediately shows the visitor what is offered on your site using sliding images with headlines. This blends in well with other features on the site as opposed to small images with headlines just placed on the site.
There is overall more viewed content as the information on the homepage is rotated and changed to show different features.
With sliders, ensure your site is very user-friendly with large and clear images in addition
to easily accessible navigation buttons and just a few slides. The slides should be moderately slow or even manually controllable to ensure they are readable. Place relevant information and direct links to the slides for easier accessibility by the site visitor.
With careful planning and layout of content, a slider will make your site’s user experience unforgettable and keep the clients coming back.
Articles
This refers to the use of SEO articles (Search Engine Optimization). Search Engine Optimization is a web publishing technique used for increasing the visibility of the web page, thus attracting more readers and traffic and gaining a higher ranking for the website on the various search engines.
SEO articles are therefore written to increase the relevance of your website content and attract more targeted traffic to your website. The more Google sees your content, the higher it will rank. This is therefore, an important product to consider during your website design.
The articles are written to ensure the best search engine results and also for the reader. Articles should therefore, be well written, easy to read and overall interesting to attract potential clients.
Key words and phrases should be strategically placed, preferably at the start and end of the article, with the use of hyperlinks on the keywords to boost your readership and direct traffic to your site.
Most importantly, make the articles shareable to gain higher rankings and also share them on the popular social media platforms. The more your article is reposted or re-shared, the better it is for your business.
Images
This involves the use of graphics in the form of designs or visual images in the design of your website. The images can be either functional and there to pass important information to the client or simply artistic for an attractive and memorable site. Therefore images are simply included in the website design to illustrate, entertain or inform the user.
The importance of having well developed, sharp and clear images on your site includes:
Pictures have the ability to communicate better with clients than words due to the visualization effect. For new, innovative products, images help clients understand the product better and thus increased sales.
Images have a lasting emotional effect as compared to words. With a good web designer, you can use the pictures on your site to invoke emotion in users and improve your sales and business in general.
Images enable you to sell an ideal, a lifestyle or an idea without even using words. Images are generally adapted faster by the brain and therefore a prospective client is bound to reach a decision to purchase faster as compared to if they have to read long texts or imagine how the product looks.
An expressive site will keep customers coming back. This is because they are more user-friendly, interesting and generally attractive.