Most of you might have always been thinking about making a website and wonder how to do it exactly…
“What kinds features should I keep on my website?”
Well, to answer this, I always say to look at the following things first:
Features of a Website:-
- What is this website all about?
- What is the purpose of website?
- Who is going to be the intended user of the website?
- What kind of content your users will be interested in?
- How they will be accessing those content?
- The function of the website?
Here is the list of the some of the common features of a website which should be present, and making for a good website altogether.
Function of a Website:-
| Feature | Requirements for users | Requirements for the editor |
| Search | Search the website for words, phrases and/or provide them with key topics from which to choose. Result page to rank results and categorise according to areas of the site. | Automatically indexes content – i.e. no input or maintenance required. |
| Online forms | Forms to be accompanied by instructions, forms to be saved and accessed at any time by the users. | Requires a form building tool so staff can build and edit forms without recourse to the web developer. This will help in collecting the web users data. |
| Login access and user permissions | User enter user name and password giving access to specific pages in the site | Establish, edit and manage list of users and passwords |
| Contact Us | Users are to complete a form that qualifies their enquiry and sends it to a designated staff member. FAQs will be part of this section of the site. | Edit the designated staff member and FAQ list |
| Subscription email lists & newsletter | Users are to be able to subscribe and unsubscribe to email lists and e-newsletter | Compose e-newsletter and emails and send to multiple recipients. Lists automatically managed |
| Downloadable files | PDFs, images, audio files etc will be on the site and should be accompanied with description of file type, size and estimated time to download | |
| AMP pages | Accelerated mobile pages to show the web page content on the mobile devices to load it faster | Strip down the CSS and JS from the pages |
| Site map | Link to site map to be available on every page. | Automatically updates when headings changed, added, moved. |
| Multilingual requirements | a page with text in selected languages is to be available via country flag button on the home page providing phone number of staff to contact for help | |
| Email a friend | e-mail a friend is to be available on relevant pages of the site – eg information pages | |
| Printer-friendly function | available on every page of the site. | |
| Bookmarking | Users are to be able to bookmark specific pages of the site. | |
| Links to other sites | Links to other sites must enable users to return to this site | Internal and external link checker is to be provided. |
| Interactive questionnaires / surveys / polls. | Use the form building tool for this | |
| Animations and videos | Specify user interface and instructions. | |
| Schema Tag | For displaying the web pages content in box format , when the page is picked up by the search engines | Helps in SEO and Content consumption by web users |
| Social Share button | Users should be able to share your webs pages just by a single click | |
| Facebook Chat Bot | Helping the web visitor to get engage with website anytime |
These are some of the feature/function of a website which every website must have, you can add on any other feature you think is import and is must to have. And I hope this article must have helped dispel any doubts you might have had regarding this topic.
