Whether you’re a coach, entrepreneur or owner of your company, a website is one of the things you should think about having if you want to be found online. The objective of a website within a digital marketing strategy is to achieve conversions, attract customers, make them fall in love with your products or services and make sure their journey through your website is interesting, professional and causes confidence on the offer, the brand and offer solutions to your clients and prospects. It doesn’t matter if you’re a beginner — just getting started, or you want to update your existing website, I bring you the definitive website checklist: 10 Things You Need to Know About Having a Website.

The Ultimate Checklist

Let’s start with the basics, the website checklist:

1. Domain
2. Hosting
3. Good Web Design + HQ logo + HD Photos
4. Responsive Website + Mobile
5. Contact Info + About Us
6. Social Network Buttons
7. SEO
8. Call to Actions
9. Home + Header
10. Blog

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The Detailed Guide

Once the website checklist has been reviewed, it is time to detail each of its elements:

Domain

The first thing to do is to claim your domain name. A domain name is a name you want to give to your website, for example, www.yourname.com. This is one of the most important parts of your website, as it is the way people will find you on the internet. It should contain your company name or personal brand or at least have some reference to your area of work.

Hosting

A web hosting service is a business or company that provides a type of internet hosting service allowing organizations, businesses and entrepreneurs make their website accessible and viewed on the internet or the World Wide Web.

In order for your website to be published online, web hosting is necessary. Make sure you have a reliable hosting with 24/7 support.

Good Web Design + HQ Logo + HD Photos

It’s advisable that your website has an attractive design, professional and easy to navigate (user-friendly). After all, your website will likely be visited by your potential customers who are looking for your products and/or services. Therefore, having a good first impression to capture their attention plus with added value and answers to their solutions can turn those visitors into customers. Good web design includes intuitive menus and no broken links. As a professional, you can’t afford to have links that go to an empty or unfinished page (404 error).

The creation of a logo or image of your brand is important as well. It must be consistent throughout all your digital networks. Another important point is the use of images and photos in high resolution so that they adapt to large monitors without losing quality.

Tip: The best thing is to consider hiring a professional to design your website.

Responsive Website + Mobile

Currently, more than 50 percent of web traffic comes from mobile devices. This means that people use their smartphones more often as opposed to desktops to inquire and acquire business information.  In that context, it’s highly recommended that your website is mobile responsive. In other words, your website must adapt to various screens of different devices available in the market.

Contact Info + About Us

The “About Us” page should describe who you are, what your company does and other relevant information you want your visitors, prospects, and customers to know about you and your business. It’s very important for people who are reading the information on your website to learn some history about you, your vision, mission and how you can provide even more value to your customers.  

Contact information is another key element to include on your site. It’s ideal for your customers and prospects to contact you so providing your company address, phone number, and email address will make it easier for them to contact you.

Social Network Buttons

While the website is the center of your presence in the digital world, social networks are elements of great strategic importance to get more people to come to your website and stay informed about your business. If done right, it can be a very effective way to increase traffic between your website and your social networks.

In the world of business, social networks help maintain a relationship with your customers or readers. So it’s important that within your page you have icons and links of your social media accounts.

SEO

You’ve probably heard of SEO (search engine optimization). If not, it’s time to do some research. It will be useless to have the best web design, interesting content, links to social networks and a flying load speed if no one comes to your page (almost non-existent web traffic). That’s where search engine optimization comes into play.

SEO is responsible for traffic to the web. It is very important to know that the search engines place the pages in the first positions as long as they adapt well to the search made by the user. Again if you want to know more about SEO and what does it have to do with your website, I highly suggest you do some research about it.

Call-to-Actions

CTAs or call-to-actions are important elements to have on your website as well. Even the best-designed sites in the world wouldn’t be effective if your visitors didn’t know where to click. Calls to action encourage your customers to respond and to purchase.

Including calls to action that are clear and easy to follow is the best way to guide your visitors to reach their goal and especially yours: to turn them into end customers. Some examples could be “Click here to register”, “Buy your product HERE”, “Click here to contact us”.

Tip: There are many different call-to-action that you can implement. Find out which one suits you best according to what your company or brand has to offer.

Home + Header

Let’s start by talking about the home page – the first page your readers arrive at. We can even say that it’s the “face” of your website that your visitors see. This is where the important information is, and it functions as the center of your website. You must make sure that no matter where your reader is on the site, he or she will easily find a link that always directs them back to the home page.

The home page does not necessarily have to say “home” or home page. Many websites place this link in the main logo of the page, this way, no matter where they are on the website, they can always return to the home page with a single click.

Another of the basic elements that a web page should have is the header or title, i.e. the first word that your visitors will read. Once a visitor arrives at your site, you need something that catches their attention, something that says “Hey, welcome and glad you’re here!”

Blog

The last thing on our website checklist and often missing from business websites are blogs. A blog is a great way to continually add content to your site and add that value for your readers and customers. There are many reasons why starting a blog for your business is a good idea. It’s a good way to keep customers coming back to your site. Blogs also contribute to your positioning as a leader within your industry.

One of the main reasons for creating a blog is to take advantage of the SEO benefits it provides. If you’ve set it up correctly, and you regularly update with relevant articles,  search engines will view it as part of your content marketing.

Hope this checklist is of value and helpful for you. Check out my previous articles and be on the look-out for future content in leadership, social media, and more! Thanks.