A lot of businesses do not exploit all the features that a website can have. Your website is your business and having a professional looking website, will provide credibility to your business and drive in traffic.

Because your website is online 24/7, customers are not limited to learning about your business and you can have your website tailor made to provide those exact features your customers are looking for. Here is a list of the possible features a website can have:

1. A good aesthetics corporate look and feel, home page with the business’s mission, vision, values, welcome intro, a nice sliding banner showcasing products and services etc

2. Member login/ registration — to allow users to login and access private documents.

3. Search — so visitors can easily search for information on your website..

4. Content management system — like joomla, wordpress, drupal to make content editing easier for even laymen.

5. Admin console backend where the admin can access all the website stats and activities.

6. Statistics section to view visitors’ activities like which pages they tend to access more, which search phrases are leading them to your website, browsers being used, visitor’s country or location etc.

7. Online Contact form which can collect demographic information about the enquirer like name, company, phone, address, email, business type and the actual enquiry which can either be emailed to the website owner and/ or stored in an online database.

8. Google maps location which is an interactive map integrated on the contact page showing the exact location of your business in case visitors want to navigate and zoom in to get directions.

9. Downloads where important documents like application forms, user guides etc. can be placed and these can include a counter to record the number of times documents have been downloaded.

10. Advertising banners to commercialize your website by having clients pay to place adverts on your website

11. Google adsense — Same as above but utilising google to place its pay per click adverts on your website ad slots

12. Frequently Asked Questions to provide answers to commonly asked questions thus filter out monotonous questions.

13. Live chat interaction to have a one on one live chat between the website and the visitors providing them with quick detailed responses or even guiding them to the relevant pages they are looking for

14. Polls allow visitors give feedback about certain products or topics or even provide a comparison tool between items you would have listed for review.

15. Testimonials. Every business always has happy customers and there is no harm in having a testimonial page where their reviews have been recorded and displayed for other potential businesses to see.

16. News ticker or Notice board to provide important news headlines or general news updates

17. Email newsletters allows you to collect users’ email so you can then send them bulk marketing emails on a weekly or monthly basis

18. Bulk SMS also allows you to collect users mobile numbers which you can then send bulk sms about any marketing campaigns you might have

19. Search Engine optimisation (SEO) is a technique used to rank your website high on search engines like google, yahoo search, bing etc. so that when a certain product is sought, your website will always be one of the top 3 to come up on google thus increasing chances of being clicked by visitors.

20. Social Media Integration. Technology is now about social media and your business needs to have all these social media accounts which can then be integrated on the website and the list can include Facebook, twitter, Instagram, google+, Youtube, tumblr etc.

21. Article commenting especially works on news websites where you might want users to leave a comment after reading your article. This helps in SEO ranking and general sharing of ideas.

22. Email to a friend — Just like Facebook sharing, email to a friend allows users to share a page with their colleagues via email.

23. Forums allow users to share ideas about certain topics and as the website admin, you can choose the topics to be centred around your website products and services so as to increase interactivity and SEO ranking

24. Blogging — This allows users to write about new material or a new product or service so as to keep visitors interested in your services as you keep updating them and also ranks you high on SEO.

25. Videos and animation — Nowadays businesses use videos as explainer guides and they can even be in the form of animations because these are captivating and can attract users’ attention. Since videos chew high bandwidth, you can reduce high hosting fees by having the videos hosted externally on Youtube but integrated on your website.

26. Audios and podcasts — Just like videos, audios and podcasts can be pre-recorded tutorials or interviews for users to listen to.

27. Event management system helps to show past, current and upcoming events you might be planning with features such as booking a seat etc.

28. Gallery is simply a module that shows pictures of your products, services, business or even events that might have taken place etc.

29. Portfolio can showcase all the projects you have done for your clients including descriptions and costings if need be

30. Company structure, just like your company profile this can have pictures and positions of your company team including their positions and qualifications.

31. Mobile compatibility — With the ever increasing use of smartphones, you definitely need to target the mobile market through providing a mobile compatible website.

32. SSL Secure certificate is a security measure encrypted on your website especially if running an online store or similar.

33. Online stores are the way to trade in this current economy where cash is hard to come by hence the government is importing thousands of POS machines to cater for this.

34. Android and iOS apps — To complement your website you need to have apps to cater for the mobile phone users.

These are some of the features a website can have and it is very possible to have all of them depending on what you want to achieve. We can tailor make a quotation based on the items you choose from the list above and even recommend based on your business type provided we have your company profile.

Feel free to visit ZIMHOST Webdesigners, a 14 ICT company of the year award winner and our Web Developers will help you improve your business. ZIMHOST Webdesigners, 1st Floor, Angwa Hse, Cnr Angwa/ G. Silundika, 0771 111 222, 04 796528, [email protected], www.zimhost.com

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