When you want to create or redesign a website, you will want to offer the best experience to your users and thus derive the maximum benefit (more visits, more contacts, more orders, etc.) or you can hire a web design company.
To achieve these goals, your site will of course need to be at its best. The quality of the design, the speed of loading, the clarity in the content and the navigation, its optimization for referencing will already be very important elements to make your showcase site perfect.
Then, to maximize the achievement of your goals and maximize your performance, you can add a number of features.Let us take a see features most often seen on showcase sites, and why they might be useful for yours.
Chat
Chat is a module that most often appears in the lower right corner of a showcase site. It is an invitation for the visitor to discuss (chat) and ask all his questions to the managers of the showcase site, and to have an answer (normally immediate). Indeed, on your site, you must maximize the points of contact, in order to “recover” any prospect who does not find what he is looking for, and “prevent” him from leaving your website (which would increase your bounce, which Google doesn’t like). In addition to your clearly visible phone number, a contact page with a contact form, you can therefore add a Chat module.
The plugins that I recommend are Tawk.to and Zendeskwhich offer free solutions already very sufficient for the average person. Also take a tour on Salesiq (edited by Zoho ). It is a module that is well enough to follow the journey of your visitors live. Manually or automatically, you can then get in touch with them (after visiting 3 pages, or after going to the “Prices” page, etc.).
Be careful though with the Chat. Even if you make it easy to get in touch with yourself, you shouldn’t save yourself from explaining everything well on your site. Because a large number of visitors will not make the effort to contact you, if your site is poor in information, your services are unclear, etc.
Forum
A forum is a space on your site where you invite your users to get in touch with you and also for them to do so with each other. Your users sometimes have technical questions, doubts, and need answers. An employee of your company can then respond, but also the community.
Google, for example, provides a powerful help forum where users help each other. I would say this is more for large groups, which have a massive volume of users. It is then interesting to bring them together on a platform (forum type) which belongs to you. For smaller structures, I would opt a priori (except in special cases) to go through traditional social networks, where you animate your community.
Blog
Blogging consists of writing articles (like this one) related to the theme of your business and your website. The goal is to offer relevant, interesting, useful content for your visitors. By providing them with such content, you reinforce several things in them: better brand attachment, credibility, loyalty, regular visits to your site, etc.
In addition, search engines like Google attach strategic importance to the content produced by them. websites. Between a competitor who only has a 5 page website, and you who have a similar 5 page site, but with 50 blog posts, you will find that Google will give you a lot more visibility.
In short, a Blog is undoubtedly a fundamental lever today to activate in your webmarketing strategy .
To create a blog, you can do it directly from WordPress (the most recommended), because the tool is made for that at the base. On the other hand, to have a nice blog, well drawn, it will be necessary that your topic proposes it, or that your agency draws it (home page of the blog, article page, page authors, categories, tag,…). Otherwise, you can of course write articles and publish them, but they will not make you want to be read because they will be poorly promoted.
Finally, before you start writing, find out (from us for example) how to write a blog article, how to set up a real blogging strategy.content marketing , how to make your efforts pay off.
Photo & Video Gallery
People often use to say that a picture is worth of 1000 words . And even a video would be worth 100 images.
All this to say that the integration of photos (and videos) is essential in your store. Through images, you will pass messages much faster than with text. Be careful, you still need a lot of text on your site to be well identified by search engines.
These images or videos (rich media) can then be presented in the form of galleries. The environment of a hotel, the dishes of a restaurant, festive evenings at a bar, a product manufacturing process, the premises of your company, your team,….
Many plugins exist on WordPress to integrate a photo gallery to your site.
Newsletter subscription
If you have your customers’ personal information, that’s good (and often is). Even better if you have those of your prospects. Indeed, through a dedicated plugin, you encourage visitors to your site to subscribe to your newsletter. This allows you to collect a database as you go, with emails from hundreds, thousands of potential prospects.
Once these emails have been acquired, and after having enough, you then put in place an email marketing strategy . It consists of animating your database, with regular content (blog articles, company news, new services, etc.). Your brand always stay in the minds of your prospects (and customers too), and when they need something, they will immediately think of you.
Social media share buttons
The sharing buttons consist of allowing (encouraging) your visitors to share content on your site on their social networks in 1 click. These buttons will generally be on each blog article, or each page of a product catalog, or each image in a photo gallery, …
By sharing your content, your visitors become your ambassadors , since they make your company known to everyone. network of friends.
In addition, Google will favor your blog article in its ranking, for example, if it sees that in addition to being visited often, it is also strongly shared. He will consider that it is a successful article, and which can therefore be of interest to other people.
Slider Images
A slider is usually present on the home page, just below the menu (and above the waterline). These are usually 3 to 5 images on which there text is, and which present different elements of your website. It is in a way a highlighting of sections of your site.
If, and only if the design is well done (by a real web designer), the rendering can be really attractive and encourage clicks. You also direct your visitors to where to go on your site.
Google Maps
On the internet, customers need to be reassured by your business. Indeed, in the digital age, you have to know how to recreate this bond of trust. And the integration of a Google Maps map with the location of your company can play this role (in addition to other elements of reassurance of course).
While this can be optional if you only have one point of sale (or factory, offices, etc.), as soon as you increase their number, I strongly recommend adding a google map. You can thus add all the places where you are present on a map. This suddenly gives the image of a significant company.
Also, the other very crucial point, if these places are supposed to welcome visitors (customers, suppliers), it is to integrate in the map the exact coordinates in order to facilitate the task of the people who wish to come to you. And if they do this from their mobile, they can automatically choose the “Route” mode and get the ideal route to come to you.
On WordPress, you can use for example the following plugin: WP Google Map Plugin
Customer Access
Depending on the activity of your business, or the information you want to share, it may be useful to give restricted access to your customers . You have several categories of customers, and not all have access to the same rights. Here are some examples:
- An accounting firm that provides its clients with the various necessary and confidential documents.
- A language school that provides various training videos, but only for customers who have purchased the full package.
- An e-commerce site which offers its customers the possibility of finding the history of their orders, invoices, etc.
If you are offering this service to your customers, then it is advisable to pair this with an SSL certificate (https) which secures your site against theft of your customers’ information. See with your web host to get one. Then configure it preferably with a web agency to ensure that it is done well.
Contact form
Although more basic than a contact form, and yet some rules apply.
First of all, the contact form is there to encourage your visitors to start a discussion with you. He intervenes either in a prospecting process (we are looking to obtain new leads), or in a loyalty process (we are trying to be available to our customers).
I would tend to advise therefore to always have a contact form, even if you add an email and a phone number. Indeed, the latter require an additional “effort”. However, what could be simpler and faster than filling out a form, if it only contains the essential fields (maximum 5 I would say).
Product catalog
When you market a large number of products (sometimes even services), it is then useful to integrate a module that allows you to generate a product catalog. It then looks like an e-commerce site in every way. You have categories, filters, product sheets. The only thing is that you don’t integrate online payment.
Arranging your products in this way makes your offer much clearer and more precise (thanks to the product sheets), and therefore more attractive.
E-commerce – Buy button
Within your own storefront site, you might want to sell some services or products online. You then have the opportunity to add an online payment module ( Woocommerce for example with a site developed under WordPress).
If this online sales activity is the majority compared to the rest of the site, then you must consider your activity as a real e-commerce site.
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