Internet Marketing

Checklist Of The 10 Most Important Things A Website Needs To Have

by Robert James Hardy · September 20, 2012

Checklist Of The 10 Most Important Things A Website Needs To Have
Use this checklist to make sure your website is performing at its best. If you are missing just one of the items on this checklist, you could be driving visitors away, hurting your search engine optimization, and costing your lost sales. Whether you are selling DVDs, running a subscription web site, or creating Google support WordPress sites, you’ll want to make sure your sites have all ten of the items below. Missing just one of these items can cost you money in lost sales, lower search engine ranking, fewer backlinks, and lost customers. Here’s the list.
PASS	FAIL	COMPONENT BEING CHECKED
		Uncluttered, easy to read site design – If you want visitors to stay on your site for more than a few seconds, give them a uncluttered, easy-to-read site design that looks good on all screen sizes, and loads quickly. Avoid overloading the home page with too much text, any moving objects, any sounds or video. Keep the front page simple, and give visitors a reason to want to see more. Use a plain white background with black text, blue clickable links, and easy to find navigation.
		A Clear Description of what the site is about and who it is for – If you want visitors to stick around, don’t make them guess what the site is about, or who it is for. Tell them in the home page headline what the site is, and in the subhead who the site is for. Let visitors know this is the website that they have been searching for.
		A simple, easy-to-remember, no spam web address – Your domain name is your brand. It should be easy to remember, easy to spell, easy to type, and not be something that a visitor would be ashamed to tell others about or show up in their browsing history. Choose a .com address for highest visibility and easiest for visitors to remember
		An easy to navigate menu system – Every page on your web site should have a menu with single click links that take them to the most important areas of your site. The menu should be in the same place on every page, and should not use hidden drop down links for navigation. A menu under your top of the page graphic, as well as a left column menu is recommended. Not only does the menu system help visitors navigate your site, it gives the search engines a path they can follow to reach every page on your site.
		A contact us link on every page – Not every visitor will have the time or patience to search through all the pages on your site in order to find the product or service or answer to the question they are looking for. So make it easy for them to contact you by including a ‘contact us’ link on every page of your site. Visitors should be able to click your ‘contact us’ link and be taken to a page where they can use an email form to contact you, as well as find your mailing address and phone number (optional).
		A Search link on every page – It is important to make it easy for visitors to find the content they are looking for on your site. And if your site has more than just a few pages, you owe it to your visitors to include a way they can quickly search your site. The search engine should be able to quickly search all your pages and present visitors clickable links to the pages they are looking for.
		A Privacy Policy link on every page – If you are running Google Adsense ads or are using cookies, you absolutely need to have a link to your privacy policy on every page of your site. Not only does Google Adsense require you include a privacy policy if you run Google Ads, the Google Search engine will rank sites that do have privacy policies higher, than sites that do not have a privacy policy. A quick way to create a privacy policy is to use the free privacy policy generator at http://www.serprank.com/privacy-policy-generator/
		A Products link on every page on your site – If you are selling products or have a shopping cart, you should definitely include a link to the products page or shopping cart on every page of your site. This makes it much easier for visitors to instantly find your products, without having to search for them. A good place to put the products link is in the top of the page menu of your site, as well as in the left navigation menu.
		Social Network Links on every page of the site – If you want visitors to share what they find on your site with their Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other social network friends, you’ll want to include social network links on your pages. With social network links, a visitor can click one of the icons and instantly share headlines and page summaries from your site with thousands of their friends.
		A free ‘tip of the week’ sign up page – If you want to build an ongoing relationship with visitors and potential customers, a good way to do that is to include a free ‘tip of the week’ sign up form on every page of your site. This gives visitors an opportunity to sign up for more free information from you, and gives you a way to stay in touch with visitors via email each week. To power your tip of the week, you’ll want to use a mail list manager system such as www.aweber.com or www.constantcontact.com. When you sign up with them, they’ll provide the sign up form html, and manage your double opt-in email signups, cancels, weekly mailings and more

If your web site has all the above, congratulations! You are well on your way to having a successful web site.

If you are missing a few items, consider taking the time to adding them to your site right away.

Of the list of the ten items above, #6, #9 and #10 are the only 3 that might not be applicable to all sites – depending on the site content and purpose of the site.