There was a time when simply having a website put you well ahead of the competition. It didn’t matter whether your website was a complex, interactive flash “experience”, a sophisticated CMS or a simple online business card; owning any form of website at all was enough to impress your potential customers and make you look like a forward-thinking, tech-savvy company.
Sadly, those days are long gone. Today, anyone able to use the Internet can set up a sophisticated looking website using an auto-installer for WordPress or a similar CMS. Users now expect a certain standard of presentation and a certain range of basic features, from the websites they frequent. If you want to impress your customers, you will have to build a good looking, sophisticated and immersive website. Here are a few must-have features for modern websites.
Social Media Integration:
You cannot expect your users to share the content of your website with their friends and family if they have to open a new browser window, sign in to their social network, copy your site’s URL, write a description by hand, choose an image and click share. That’s far too much work for the average person browsing the web during their lunch break.
If you want people to share your content, make it easy for them. Add social media buttons that will auto-populate important fields and send updates without the visitor having to manually open a new tab. Most CMS setups now have plugins that support this feature and there are standalone widgets available from variety of companies, so there really is no reason to expect your visitors to do everything themselves.
Simple Contact Options:
Consumers have become accustomed to being able to get instant answers to their questions. This means they don’t expect to telephone and wait on hold, send an email, or worse – write a letter. Today’s customers want instant answers via support forums, live chats and ticketing systems. If you’re outsourcing your tech support, the company you use should be able to help integrate their web chat and ticket systems into your website. If you’re doing your own support in-house, ask your web design company to make easy-to-access support a priority in their design.
Responsive Templates:
Responsive templates are site designs that display well on any device. Instead of forcing users to scroll, pan or zoom to see all the information they are interested in, the template will re-size and even re-arrange itself to suit the screen size and orientation of the user’s device.
Responsive templates make it easier for users to navigate your site, increasing those all-important retention and conversion rates.
There are many other features you may want to add to your site – such as one-click ordering, the ability for users to choose their own skins, threaded discussions in the comments section and user voting. Work with your web designer to choose the best features for your business.
There are many benefits to working with a local web designer and you can find Manchester web design here. Choose a company that is responsive and will work with you to update and maintain your website over the long term.