Every business needs a website. Yours too!
Especially if you are a small business owner, a website should be an integral part of your business development plan. Without a website, you may not be able to scale-up your small business.
How can a website help your business?
- It can help you to reach a wider audience.
- Website development is pocket-friendly. Yes, the cost to build a website is much affordable. Have a look at our affordable website design packages.
- Your competitors also have a website. Your website can enable you to compete efficiently.
- Most of the buyers prefer to order, search, or compare their products & services online. So, if you are not online, you are losing your customers.
- Online marketing & advertising is much affordable than the traditional methods of marketing such as magazines, billboards, TV, radio, etc.
Now that we know how a website can grow your business & company, let’s take a look over some of the must-have features of a company website.
In this blog post, I have shared 8 essential elements that your corporate website design must have.
Let’s get started!
#1 List of services
For a company website to be profitable, it is essential to showcase their services.
In other words, your business website must have a list of all the services that you provide and each service must have a dedicated page to help the users understand your offerings in detail.
Additionally, you can also ask your website developer to include a ‘contact’ form or ‘get a quote’ form on each service page so that the users can easily fill the form and contact you for more details. It will definitely help to increase the number of leads that you will get from your website.
#2 Live chat
Live chat is perhaps one of the best tools that your developer can include on your website to increase the leads & grow your business.
When you integrate a live chat system on your corporate website, your visitors can easily initiate a chat and resolve all of their queries. The quick process of query resolution further helps the users to make their decisions.
The live chat feature can also help you to gather your customer details without having them to fill the form on your website.
To sum up, below is the list of 5 major benefits that you will get from the live chat:
- More sales
- Customer’s convenience
- Improving customer service & loyalty
- Faster problem resolution
- Competitive advantage
#3 Appealing content
It’s well said that content is king. A website with appealing content always attracts users to take action.
If this is the first time that you are building a corporate website, you may be wondering what kind of content your website should have. Don’t worry.
Here are some tips to write appealing content on your website:
- You must know your audience and write the content accordingly.
- Write short & simple sentences.
- Don’t use your industry jargon in your content.
- Provide proper spacing between the paragraphs and sentences so that the content is easy-to-scan.
In addition, you should also write SEO-optimized content on your website so that your website has a higher chance of getting ranked on search engines.
#4 Call-to-action
What’s call-to-action?
Call-to-action could be a word, button, or image that induces the website visitors to take action.
What are the benefits of using call-to-action elements on your business website:
- Call-to-action increases the leads & sales on your website.
- Call-to-action makes it easier for users to make a decision and take action.
- Call-to-action eliminates the confusion among users on what to do next.
Now that you know the importance of call-to-action elements on any website, you must ask your website designer to include a call-to-action on all the important pages of your website such as services, contact us, etc.
#5 Testimonials
Testimonials are the formal statements from your existing or past customers that testify the quality of your services & support.
You can request your customers to write a few words and describe their overall experience in working with you. What did they like most about your services and why they will choose you again.
Why you should showcase testimonials on your business website:
- Customer testimonials help build trust
- Testimonials are a great source of referrals.
- Positive testimonials can become your greatest sales technique.
Where you must show the testimonials on your website?
You can show some of the best testimonials on the homepage and also add an additional webpage dedicated to testimonials.
#6 Easy-to-use CMS
Website development is not a one-time thing. You do need to update your website with the latest information. Be it the new contact address, telephone number, email, or any service(s), you have to keep your website up-to-date.
But in order to make minor changes on your website, it’s not feasible to hire a web developer again and again. Firstly, it’s gonna cost you a lot and secondly, it delays the whole process of updating.
For example, if you want to change the phone number on your website urgently, you will have to rely on your web developer or designer’s availability to make these kinds of minor changes.
Instead, you must have an easy-to-use CMS (content management system) on your website so that you can easily login and make those changes hassle-free.
It will not only save your web design cost, but it will also save you time.
#7 Security
Security has become an integral part of any website development process. If your website is not secure, you can face several kinds of serious problems like malware infections, hacking, and so on.
Ironically, most of the website developers do not pay attention to the website’s security.
When you hire a web developer to build your website, do make sure that he or she is able to secure your website from all kinds of possible threats.
Below are some of the ways in which your website builder can secure your website:
- Updating all the plugins & themes.
- Authenticating the source of plugins & themes.
- Taking care of important file permissions.
- Changing the default URL & username of the admin area.
- Installing the required security plugins.
Recommended post: 10 Ways to secure your WordPress website from hackers & malicious codes
#8 Contact Form
Last but not the least, your business website must have a user-friendly & intuitive form for all of your potential customers to fill and contact you.
Here are some tips for you to follow while integrating a form on your corporate website:
- The form must be intuitive & user-friendly (easy-to-fill).
- The form must be responsive to all the smart devices such as mobiles & tablets.
- The form must be redirected to a thanks page after submission.
- The form fields must be validated properly.
- The form shouldn’t have too many fields.