In the realm of the digitized world and the ongoing pandemic, every business is striving to build a successful website. Building a successful website not only requires a good taste of web design but also needs you to have knowledge about the different elements of web content.
If you are also looking to learn how to make a successful website, you have come to the right place. In this article, we will be discussing the different elements of aspects that are crucial for building a successful website.
The Eight Key Elements of a Successful Website
Every successful website has the following key elements.
1. An Appealing Web Design
The web design or website template that you use plays a major role in making your website attractive or unattractive. When users visit your site, they must find it tempting enough to keep browsing around. If they do not like the colors, or if the text is too scribbly, or if they simply do not find it easy to navigate, they will end up leaving with a very small chance of returning. This will cause you to have a high bounce rate and very low engagement on your site.
So you need to know how to select the right template for your website. A successful website design is one in which the color theme matches with your brand logo, and the content is neatly inserted. All the buttons should be in place and the menu bar should be clearly visible to site users. It is good for a website to have a site map as well. These are all features of a good website template and need to be kept in mind when you are building a successful website. But most importantly, you must select a template that suits your business needs.
2. A Visible Header and Footer
The header and footer are those sections of a site that are visible on each of its web pages. They play an important role in making the template of a successful website complete. Businesses with awesome websites are familiar with the best practices of a website header. The brand logo is usually inserted in the header, and it should not appear messy when the browser size is reduced or when the website is opened from a different device. The search bar is also part of a good website header, and we will talk about it in the next section.
3. Good Search Functionality
The search functionality of a website is very important in building a successful website. It plays a major role in satisfying a site visitor’s needs. When someone visits your site for the first time, they are not fully aware of the site map. Customers usually need to find what they want as fast as possible. If you have an online store, no matter how neatly you organize your products in the store, your customers would prefer to directly search for the exact product that they need. That’s why not having good search functionality in your online store can cause you to lose many potential sales.
4. Quality Product Photography
When you sell your products through a website, your customers view and try to feel your products by looking at the photographs you upload. It is therefore highly recommended to have good quality product photography for your site.
Even if you are not running an e-commerce site, you would still need to upload some photographs that represent your business, service, and corporate culture. The quality of these pictures has a great impact on the site visitor’s perception of your brand. You do not need an expensive camera to take good photographs these days. You can simply take pictures with your smartphone, but make sure they are not blurry. Good photographs are one of the key elements of a successful website.
5. Responsiveness
In this day and age, people browse websites from different devices. A successful website is one that is responsive enough to be browsed neatly from all kinds of devices. Your website must either have a separate mobile version or its original web design should be mobile-friendly. Users should not have a problem browsing your web pages from both iOS and Android. Most of the users browse a website for the first time from a mobile phone these days. That’s why when you launch your site, it should be responsive and mobile-friendly from the very first day. Optimizing a mobile website is not so complicated. As long as you use a website builder that is accustomed to building a mobile website, you can make your website appear neat and appealing on a mobile phone.
6. Sufficient Call-to-Action Buttons
Every successful website has sufficient call-to-action buttons on its landing page. These can be one or more of the following.
- Learn More
- Read More
- Shop Now
- Buy Now
- Add to Cart
- Contact Us
Each of these buttons has a meaning assigned to it. For example, an ‘add to cart’ button shows that by clicking on it, the user can put the selected item or product into his/her shopping cart.
No matter how organized your website is, your site visitors might feel lost if you do not include call-to-action buttons in it. For instance, when a customer reads a product review on your site and feels enticed to buy the product, he/she needs to be guided in terms of what he/she needs to do next for moving towards making the purchase. This is where a ‘buy now’ button can be very helpful.
7. Good Customer Support Service
A successful website must always have multiple means to provide good customer service to its visitors. Customers require customer support before, during, and after making a purchase. Most websites provide customer service via a contact form.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
Customers prefer using those means of support that are the most responsive, personalized, and instant. This is why the best kind of customer support that a website can provide these days is in the form of a live chat feature installed into the site. Having a live chat service on your site helps you to simply chat your way to more customers.
8. An Attached Blog for Content Marketing
Businesses that have a successful website are placing more and more focus on content marketing these days. And one of the best ways to do content marketing is to have a blog of your own that is linked to your brand website. This gives you a platform to talk about your brand and the industry you operate in, which in turn presents you as an expert in your field. Blog articles are different from newsletters. They promote your brand more indirectly. Nonetheless, they are a cost-effective means for developing a good brand image.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
How to Create a Successful Website?
Now that you know all the elements that are required for you to have a successful website, you must be feeling a bit overwhelmed as to how to create a successful website. But don’t worry! With our tool, you can build a successful website with all these key elements in a simple manner.
Strikingly is a website builder that enables you to build a successful website without the help of a web developer or programmer. It offers sufficient features in its free plan to get you started with your own website.
Image taken from Strikingly
To build a successful website in Strikingly, you just have to follow the steps described below.
1. Sign Up for a Free Strikingly Account
All you need to do is fill up your first name and email address, and assign a password to your account on the Strikingly landing page, as shown in the image above.
2. Choose Your Website Template
We offer a variety of website templates for you to select from to build a successful website. We have a successful website design for each category. If you want to create a blog website, select a blog template. If you are looking to build an online store, select a store template. Browse through the features available in each template, and choose one that suits your business needs the most.
Image taken from Strikingly
3. Key in Your Web Content
Next, you can key in all the web content into your web pages. Our drag-and-drop feature allows you to insert text, upload images, and embed videos in any place of a web page that you like. Make sure you give out enough information about your brand and your business and include your business contact details for your site visitors to get in touch with you. A successful website is one that gives out this information generously.
Strikingly also allows you to collect subscribers on your website. Once you have a good number of people signing up, you can start sending newsletters to your subscribers.
4. Add Sections to Your Site
Strikingly allows you to add different sections to your site.
- You can add a blog section where you post articles about the industry you’re operating in.
- You can add a simple store section to sell products from your site.
- You can add a section for a contact form or a sign-up form to collect customer feedback and subscribers.
All these features will contribute to making it into a successful website.
Image taken from Strikingly
5. Use the Live Chat Feature
Don’t forget to use the Strikingly live chat feature, so that your customers can get in touch with you any time they need. We have a knowledge base help center in Strikingly that you can visit to get any commonly asked questions answered.
If you go through these steps one by one, you will realize that building a successful website for your business is not difficult after all. Our goal at Strikingly is to help our users create a successful website with as much ease as possible, so that they can have more time and energy left to focus on the other aspects of their business. You can also build a website with us in just a few hours. All you need to do is to sign up for your free account now.
