What Are The Most Important Components Of A Website?
Just like asking a parent their favourite child, you should never ask a web designer the most important part of a site. Each part is equally important and without one, others become significantly less relevant.
But just like parents, we secretly have our favourites...
Landing Page
We’re not saying it’s the most important but… without a strong landing page how long are you really going to stay on a site for? A second or two maybe five maximum before you decide it’s not for you?
Your landing page is generally the first page anybody will see of your site, but more importantly for us and something we want to really emphasis to you, this is likely somebody’s first impression of your brand. Your virtual store front! You wouldn’t invest all of your resources in stock, staff, till systems and shop layout if the front of the store looks run down, and we have the same outlook on the landing page.
The landing page should not only look amazing, but should resemble your brand, your ideas and your philosophies. It should harness any passers by and make somebody who may have just stumbled across your website want to stay for longer. This is where the most emphasis from a design and development goes into, with a strong landing page, the other pages seem to write themselves.
Blogs
What doesn’t write themselves unfortunately is blogs, however that doesn’t make them any less important. Blogs not only generate organic traffic to your site from google search but also help to give google information about what your site is about.
Google reads every site, and the more pages you give it to read, the more it thinks of your site as somewhere people may want to land. And trust me here, having google as your friend when it comes to building a website is key. This idea is more commonly known as SEO, which guess what… we’ve written a blog about!
link blog to blog about the importance of SEO
Blogs can be about anything, from processes within your business, to how to join as a member to a gym, all the way to who your staff have all chosen in a World Cup sweepstake. Content is key here, even if it may seem irrelevant, as long as it is unique, well written and something that somebody might be interest in then its worth writing about. Bonus points if it is directly related to you and your brand!
Animations & Graphics
We’ve now managed to get people onto the site, we’ve kept them here with a good landing page so let’s keep them here. There are millions of examples of different animations and graphics that we can use to keep aesthetics high, and engagement even higher!
Whether it’s a ticker to show off the brand you’ve worked with, or some of your google reviews or if its an mouse following animation they all have their advantages, but the important part is keeping engagement high. These should be dotted around your site, equally distributed between different pages, there is absolutely no harm in having the same graphic or animation appear multiple times on a site, especially if it is something that could be relevant in different areas.
Copy-writing
The copy-writing on your page is beyond vital and should go hand in hand with the animations and graphics alongside it. This should really resemble who you are, and should sound like you wrote it, whether you did or not we won’t tell anyone!
It should be informative without being boring. But importantly get across the ideas that you want to convey from that given page. Website text doesn’t always have to be formal, if you and your brand aren’t then why should that have your site? Equally if your brand is then it absolutely should! There is no right or wrong way for the copywriting to be written in general, but in certain situations it could come across wrong or not follow the rest of the website’s design!
CTAS
Call to actions are imperative on most sites. We want to remind people why you set up this website in the first place. We want people to come across your site, think how amazing it looks and naturally feel obliged to do whatever it is that you want them to do!
If you designed the website with the ambition to get more people to fill the form in, then remind them throughout their experience. If you want people to book a room at your hotel, remind them!
Design a website worthy of their time, and earn the right to ask them to do what you intended on them to do!
Call to actions can be permanent pieces to a page, they can pop up in a corner, or cover the full screen. They may give generic information, or may highlight a specific time sensitive promotion. Each with their own uses, some of which may not feel right on your specific site, but others might fit the style that we’re looking for
Forms
The final piece of the puzzle, once the user is here the primary aim of the site is complete, but we need to finish off the job.
There is no point writing blogs to get as many people as possible to your site, and them then coming onto your site and being amazed by it if we don’t have a way to capture who they are. Now we could have a really simple contact us form, asking the user to give their name email address and a brief description, and these work for some sites, but we think we generally we can do one better!
At Tweyelight, we put a huge emphasis on complex forms, forms that are not only more engaging to the user, but also captivate more information that a more simple form. Not only does this make the user feel more engaged but it also gives us significantly more information about who they are, meaning we’re not shooting in the dark when we make contact.
Forms need a lot of careful consideration, too long and people will get bored, click off and you’ve gained nothing. Too short and we main to gain as much information as we would’ve hoped to… theres a real science behind it but luckily for you, we’ll take care of that!
