Web design can be a complex process. What are the features which a good website must have is a subjective thing. What works for someone else might do opposite for you. Either you’ve a website or you’re looking for new venture, there are some website essentials you should consider.

These website essentials are general qualities that a website should have in order to be effective and serve their purpose. These qualities can be web features that make the owner’s life easy. Likewise, they can be design quality that making user’s life easy.

10 Website Essentials of A Good Business Website

I figured out the following features a good website must have to ensure your customers have a positive experience on your website, improving your company’s digital footprint and increasing the engagement level of the user with your brand.

Website Essentials #1 – Catchy URL and a Logical Roadmap

The first thing is to secure a good, catchy Domain name or URL. Make sure it makes sense for your brand or business name. URL should not have strange spelling and it should be available on social platforms to add extra advantages.

Once you’ve set up your domain URL, it’s time to architect your web pages / site and make some big decisions. Your website should be visually pleasing, but more important aspect for it is to be useful for the user. Before you start to type an HTML tag you need do the “wireframing” of your web pages.

Wireframing is the mock up a design for the site. Try to run the mock ups between few friends, staff or groups to make sure design is intuitive and makes sense. After you get the reviews for these mock-ups – modify the design or rework on it if required.

This is vital both for the user experience and for SEO, since search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo considers both the structure and the content of the website while ranking it for search results. Therefore, catchy url together with good website design bring better user experience and high search results.

Website Essentials #2 – Business Information

Depending on your business, you should have a few things on your website that fall into the realm of “information“. It may be tempting to write about your girlfriend’s dog, but if it doesn’t relate to your business website or page topic, leave it out. The website user want information about your business products and services, they are not interested in your girlfriend or her dog, unless you have created website to promote them.

Write relevant content and put conclusions at the beginning. Get to the point in the first few lines of the first paragraph and then expand upon it using simple and easy language. Make sure you use no slangs, abusive words, spelling mistakes or make grammatical errors.

Web pages need to be crisp and to-the-point. People have short attention span and they don’t read web pages, they scan them, so having short, interesting paragraphs is better than long tedious ones. Try to keep content short and crisp. Use action words telling your website page readers what to do. Keep the flow of your pages moving. Avoid the passive voice.

Website Essentials #3 – Intuitive

Website is useless without clear and easy navigation. Make sure you have easy-to-understand and reasonable logical names for various pages on your website — home, about, products, services, contact etc. Complex or cryptic navigation will turnoff the user.

When developing your navigation strategy, think about the goal of your potential customer. Why they are visiting your web pages? What you want then to do on your site? You should consider a call to action, to help potential customer or user easily do what you want them to do. Make your goals clear and obvious.

Website Essentials #4 – Contact Information

The utmost crucial business information is it’s contact information— which is why contact has its own section on a website. There’s nothing more frustrating than being unable to get address, phone or get in touch with a needed business or service.

A good website must have complete business contact information be it phone number, address, email, fax and a contact form which is easily accessible and visible to the user. Use only your domain email address instead of public domain emails like Yahoo or Gmail. This will add more credibility to your business.

Never upload contact information as part of an image — the number or address should be able to be copied or clicked on right from the website in order to make it easy and convenient for the user to place the call or send an email.

Today, most of the Android, iOS, BlackBerry and other smartphones have the ability – “click to call” on the web, so make certain that your contact information is clickable and can be copied – making things easy for the user.

Website Essentials #5  – Social Media Integration

Facebook. Twitter. Google+. LinkedIn. Tumblr. Foursquare. YouTube. Instagram. Pinterest.

Today social media is critical part of marketing. Integrating Social Media platforms into your website will help improve your business’ footprint on the social web bringing more fan following across numerous social platforms connecting you directly to your customers and potential customers. Social media integration also help boost your website SEO, giving your website higher traffic and visibility.

Apart from Social Media we also recommend to integrate RSS feeds (if you frequently update pages or info on your website) and Blog (to share your expertise or knowledge on the industry reverent events) in your website. This also helps in your website SEO and customer engagement.

Website Essentials #6 – Security

If you are planning an e-store or already selling online and you receive payments online you need to ensure security of your site and website users. This can be done with an SSL certificate. The SSL will encrypt communications or information or data transfer between you and your website user (like user information, credit card number, bank account details, Social Security number etc.).

SSL will relieve your website user fears of providing such critical and personal information, since there’s so much identity theft on the web. SSL ensures security against identity theft. TrustE, VeriSign, GeoTrust and Entrust are good options to explore.

Website Essentials #7 – Go Mobile Friendly

Today, smartphones and other mobility devices are driving more amount of web traffic. The number of mobile web users is growing very quickly, therefore making mobile devices mainstream.

A study shows that 70% of task completion happens within an hour on mobile sites. This means that the user often browses on the web with intent on mobile devices. If someone searches for a hotel on his smartphone, he’s likely to check in there within an hour. So to target more customers better make your website readable on handheld devices.

Laptops, smartphones and tablets – all of have different screen sizes and resolution. So, how can you do it? Responsive web design (RWD) is the answer. Responsive web design is a web design approach for designing websites to provide the finest and optimal user experience. A website designed with RWD adapts the layout to the users viewing environment (mobile device environment) by using fluid, proportion-based grids, scalable images and CSS3.

Responsive website design enables you to use fluid widths, so that your website layout will adjust to the screen on which it is browsed. With RWD your website images are scalable and layouts are adjustable bringing better web experience to your website user on their mobile devices.

Website Essentials #8 – Media support and FAQ

Images, flash, presentations, PDFs, audios and video and other types of media are becoming more important these days. Remember blog was once a straightforward text but today blog posts have images, videos or slideshow presentations.

Your customers or potential customers have lot of questions on issues like return policy, shipping policy, material used in product etc. You should gather up frequently asked questions by your clients into a FAQ webpage and offer quick, clear and concise answers. Your website needs to keep with the times effortlessly and help your clients by providing them exact information they are looking for.

Website Essentials #9 – Reliable Hosting

Not having a good and reliable hosting can cost dear. A slow website is frustrating and the one that fails to load is horrible – both could turn off your customers. Besides, annoying site visitors and rising bounce rate, poor hosting can lead to low search engine rank. This is because page load time is a critical factor in Google & Bing PageRank algorithm.

Website Essentials #10 – The Glitz

Flash, animation and graphics are tempting, and help you get a positive impact on user experience. But beware you need to use them appropriately. Don’t underestimate the power of simplicity. Never force your web visitor to endure anything they’re not looking for or don’t have time for or simply something they are not interested into.

Never put anything that autoplays, whether it’s audio or a video on your web pages. Instead provide playable and downloadable files so that users can access your information quickly even when they are offline.

Glitz like extraneous animations, flash, and other media including unnecessary information can slow down your webpage loading time. Never neglect your website HTML content for glitz and visual pleasures. Search Engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and other can’t read JavaScript, Flash or even PDFs. Use them appropriately.

Hope I have covered nearly everything. Share your thoughts, reviews and comments below.