Website Features – What do I need on my site?

Key website features can come in all different shapes and sizes and while not every single website you see will contain or make good use of these key features, it certainly does make sense to use them correctly. Here we will have a look at some of the key features on a website.

Website Features

Overall Website Design

The overall design and presentation of your site is essential to any potential customers or users first impressions. Reports suggest that potential customers will decide whether they want to use your company within seconds of your site loading.

Your website should generally be tidy, well presented, grammatically accurate and uncluttered. Excellent ways to keep your site uncluttered is by using plenty of margins, padding and using white-space effectively to break up site elements.

Another important factor when your site loads is; can the customer instantly know what your site is about? What are you trying to sell or promote? These key messages should be abundantly clear within seconds of the site being displayed.

Responsive Design

Responsive websites are becoming more and more essential as the popularity of using mobile and tablet devices for web browsing overtakes traditional desktop browsing. Your site should work correctly on any device without any sideways scrolling.

Reports suggest that smartphones are now the most popular choice for web browsing, meaning that if your site isn’t responsive then it’s likely that people viewing on mobile or tablet will instead choose a different site or company to use.

Frameworks such as Bootstrap and Foundation provide responsive design out the box, while the majority of WordPress themes are also built to be responsive. Another relatively recent addition to the CSS toolbox is the use of Flexbox which is gradually getting better browser support and becoming more widely used for responsive design.

Site Navigation

The site navigation one of your key website features and should be clear, easy to read and easy to find. Common issues with navigation menus include links which don’t make it clear where they take you, random symbols which you have to hover over to find out what they are and also menus being placed in places where they don’t usually go.

The navigation menu should contain links to all your key pages or provide drop-down menus if there are too many to fit on. The navigation menu should also generally be in a conventional place on the site, the most common places are either at the very top of a site or as a sidebar down the left-hand side.

Content

Site content such as text, images, downloads, and headings are the singular most important aspects of any site, the content is the reason that someone comes to your site.

Content must be relevant to what your site contains or what your company does, all content should be well written and be thoroughly checked for any spelling or grammar errors. If your content is full of errors and mistakes then potential customers are much more likely to take their business elsewhere.

Your site’s content should be original and definitely not copied from any other sites (unless you also own the content on the site), not only is this plagiarism and copyright infringement but can also have a serious impact on your sites ability to show in search engine results.

The above should also be taken into consideration with content such as images, videos, music and eBooks or PDFs. You should always ensure that you are either the creator of the content or have permission to use the content.