Website Features

Website features

Contact Form

You will often find a contact form on website's these days so that the email address doesn't have to be displayed, and so crawled by web spiders.

Contact forms were first introduced to make contacting the company via email easier (meaning a third party email application wasn't needed) and also to cut down on the amount of spam emails that were being generated from web crawlers.

Web crawlers now also crawl website contact forms and so you'll often need some kind of way to distinguish between a real human filling out the form and a web crawler filling it out.

Picture Gallery

A picture gallery is always a popular choice when you want to show off some of your best work to your website visitors.

Builders would often use a "before and after" picture approach to show how it look ed before, and then after they've finished their work, whereas, photographers are likely to use a picture gallery to separate their different photography events into different picture albums.

Blog

Adding a blog to your website will give you the ability to add entry after entry whenever you want to.

The blog website functionality is often also used when you want a latest news area on your website.

Blogging is brilliant for search engines because

It's always being updated
It's giving search engines more reason to come back to your website and crawl it
The amount of random key phrases that will be used whilst blogging about random things will mean that sooner or later someone will type your key phrase into a search engine and find your website

Quizes

Get your website visitors engaged with your website through the use of an online quiz.

Add new quizes on a regular basis and your website visitors will have a reason to come back time and time again.

Also this may be a great way to market through social networks such as Facebook when your website visitors challenge their Facebook friends through social bookmarking.

Polls

A quick and simple select your favourite and click submit for the user, but yet it still gets the website visitor engaged.

See what your website users really think, and keep it updated by starting new voting polls on a regular basis.

Online Shop

Start your eCommerce online shop using a third party shopping cart such as PayPal.

Using a third party transaction process means that there is no credit cad details in our possession and that it's all completely secure, ready to use and trusted by the website visitors.

Article Download

Do you write lots of articles? Do you want to give them away for free, but yet still get something back?

Well the article download functionality is a way that you can have articles for download, and they're completely free as long as your website visitor provides you with their name and email address so that they can be added to your mailing list.

Random Quote

Save a list of quotes that will later be shown on your website randomly selected.

This is a great feature if you have lots of testimonials that you want to display to people one at a time in a set space on the website.

Price List

Do you have products to sell, but you're not ready for an online shop?

A price list is the perfect way to categorise and list your products without having any eCommerce taking place online.

Forum

Forums these days have been quite outdated and in a way replaced with blogs.

It was always irritating to the website visitor to have to register and then login everytime they wanted to contribute on a forum, and so forums started to phase out.

Starting a community from scratch is always hard unless you already have a niche topic to talk about and you have people interested from an early stage.

Instead, these days would tend to use a blog and allow website visitors to comment on blog posts to form a conversation/small community.

Social Bookmarking

Give your website visitors the functionality to bookmark and share your website on other websites like Facebook.

Dynamic Sitemap

Have your sitemap dynamically created and updated, so once submitted to Google (and other search engines) you on't ever have to edit the file again, but it will be dynamically created to nclude every page on your website.

Dynamic Feeds

Allow your website visitors to subscribe to your latest feeds for areas of your website such as the latest news when there's a new news story, blog when there's a new blog entry, picture gallery when a new picture is added or let them subscribe to comments if they want to follow a conversation through a web page's comments.