There are countless way to design a website and even more features that you can include, but there are a few things that every website can benefit from. Whether you pay a freelancer, design company, or do it yourself not having these five things can hurt your investment. In no particular order.
1. Responsive
As more ways to access the web emerge so do screen sizes. In the 90’s you could get away with a basic website dimension. Now sites have visitors from many different computer monitor resolutions, laptops, tablets, smart phones, and even flip phones. If you don’t want your traffic bouncing away try to be accommodating with your website dimensions. A responsive site should transform from big screen to mobile. Many times menu transitions can also aid smart phone users in using your website effectively.
2. CMS
CMS or Content Management System is just how it sounds. A CMS handles your content, allowing you to update easily, expand your website, and even change your look faster than static page designs. There are many content management systems build for nearly any kind of website you could want including blogs, social media, and eCommerce.
3. SEO Capability
There are websites popping up all over the web at break neck speeds. This means more competition and you need an edge. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Ideally you would be able to change meta tags, alt tags, and even your indexing options in an easy manner. You don’t want to get stuck with some tedious process to change the way your website is displayed on search engines or what areas are indexed.
4. Ease of Use
Updating your website with fresh content should be something that you can do yourself with a short crash course, whether you designed the site or not. The more complicated the updating process the more you might find yourself dreading making updates. Content is the most important part of a website and you want an easy creating process that doesn’t take you much time.
5. Security
Website security is something that is widely overlooked and it’s very important. You don’t want your website hijacked by mischievous parties or it becoming harmful to your traffic. If you get your domain emails attacked you could end up in everyone’s spam folder. There are simple and complicated things that you can do to improve your website security, but at the very least you want some protection against brute force attacks. This holds especially true for any website based on a popular CMS.
