The Most Important Features of a Website

OK. Right off the top of your head… what do you think is the most important feature of a website? Do you think it’s the look and feel? Well, of course, that is very important. Your site must be attractive. But if that were really so important, would Craigslist be popular at all? So maybe I need to rephrase my question a little bit. If your goal is to attract new customers and convert them into potential customers, what are the most important features?

1. Structured Layout and Design – A site must begin with a layout that is nicely structured to provide easy access to all of the website information. That includes a nice menu system, blog categories and access to phone and contact forms and information.
2. Content Management System (CMS) – A well-designed CMS will enable the website manager (usually the boss) to easily add, edit and delete content. Attracting new customers starts by attracting traffic. Attracting traffic comes by earning page rank from Google and the rest. So being able to easily create new content is critical.
3. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – SEO is the process of designing a web page or article so that the content is easily understood by the search engines. This is achieved by entering descriptive, concise keyword phrases and descriptions of the page content into the Meta Tag fields of each page. A well-designed site has easy access to these fields within each page (or article) in the CMS.
4. Descriptive and Editable URLs – Look at the url of this page. It has the words “important features of a website” in it. The CMS of this website made it possible for me to edit that url so that it contains keywords that help Google et al in figuring out the content of this article. Descriptive urls are also very important if you want your content to show up in Google.
5. Landing Pages – For every service you offer, a unique form should be designed that asks the critical questions of the visitor for that service. For example. we have a form for cabling projects and a form for SEO. Each page has an icon that will take you to the appropriate form for that page. Click on the one below!

Your comments are welcome. Thank you for reading my article!