5 essential things that your startup website must have
It is very common to hear that the most important things in your website are good web design and usability, but there are much more things to consider. Many startups or businesses focus on generating traffic to their websites, investing in marketing campaigns for search engines and social networks, sending cold emails, sharing their website at events and many other things; but this is useless if those who come to your site, leave without making a purchase, signing up for your service or at least subscribing to your mailing list.
Those people who come and go without spending enough time on your website, are increasing the bounce rate of your website which besides being bad for your business, this hurts your SEO rankings because your site could be seen as not relevant to search engines like Google, for the queries and keywords in which it is indexed.
When you begin a startup you have no time or resource to apply all the pieces of advice you see about what a good website must have, so we will share 5 things that we believe are essential; you could research more by yourself later.
It is important that your visitors know what product or service is being offered by your startup or business as soon as they enter the website. Usually, you can use a simple statement in a short title and a subtitle could be added to explain more details; you can rely on pictures or videos, but always trying to keep the message clear. You must bear in mind that a value proposition is not a slogan, it is a concise message explaining to the visitor what problem you solve, how you can do it and why you are the best option.
To Toky our value proposition is:
Your value proposition may remain the same as a business, but the text which you use to present it may change after a while if you see that this is not convincing your visitors.
The CTA (Call To Action) is that button, link, or image that your visitors should click to hopefully become customers. For eCommerce sites, the CTA is the checkout or add to cart button, for services such as Toky this would be sign-up for the service. This model differs for startups in very early stages and blogs where the CTA would be a subscription to the mailing list. This call to action should be clearly identified and should be in different parts of the site. In our case, we use a green color that creates a good contrast against the blue of the website.
You must bear in mind that all text, images, and videos of the website should support your value proposition and motivate the decision to click on the CTA you defined.
3. Show a good web design and a nice user experience
It’s not just about filling your site with beautiful things; the goal is that these things guide visitors and help them to fully understand your value proposition. This includes not only the aesthetics but navigation and site structure of your startup website. It has also been shown that 75% of website visitors can base the credibility and trust in a website thanks to good design, so that first impression is very important for everything else to work.
Here at Toky, we opted for a system based on gray, white, blue and green for the CTA, simple pictures and short texts that allow seeing a clean design.
Do you want to know more about what Toky can offer to your business or startup? Visit www.toky.co. You can also see how our platform works in this infographic
It is estimated that 86% of your visitors may want to see your contact information when they visit your site [^ 2]. With this in mind, it is good to have either a contact page or having in the footer of the site, phone numbers, email, addresses and links to social media profiles. You can also include a link to a press kit which is very important if someone wants to write something about your startup. We decided for Toky to leave this information in the footer of our website:
Toky offers a simple click to call widget and chat function to allow added value to the customer contact experience
5. Clear and well-written texts
Wording, spelling and grammar are essential. The text used on your website to sell your product or service is called copy, they are not only well-written texts because they are intended to explain the value proposition and its details correctly and quickly in order to influence the purchase decision of the website visitor.
The texts of your website can be created by a professional copywriter, who can adapt the words to your type of business and target audience.
There are much more things to consider, but these are enough to start with. It is important to have a good SEO strategy but it is also important that when that traffic comes to your website, it can engage those visitors and try to turn them into potential customers.
Do you want to evaluate how is your website going? Try these tools we use
Sources:
Originally published at blog.toky.co on July 26, 2016.
