(Reading time: 4 – 7 minutes)
All effective websites designed for personal or business promotion, marketing, branding or sales have common features and capabilities, such as a way to contact the site owner, legal policies, copyright notices, an “About” page and much more.
Here’s the top 7:
- Contact form: your readers need to communicate back to you; make it easy for them.
- About page: Help people understand “What’s In It For Me?”
- Affiliations: Make sure you disclose everything you promote. It’s the law.
- Goals: You don’t have to tell anyone what you’re doing, but it helps.
- Privacy policy: Terms and conditions, privacy policy, disclaimers; necessary evils for a professional website.
- Disclaimer:
- Terms and Conditions:
It’s not difficult to implement any of these, especially when using WordPress.
Let’s take a quick look at each.
1. Contact form
Using a contact form allows readers to contact you while protecting you from email spam.
Many WordPress websites use “Contact Form 7″ which is easily found using the builtin plugin search form: “Plugins > New.”
The configuration page for Contact Form 7 is located in the “Tools > Contact Form 7″ menu. As you will see, the plugin author has laid out an easy-to-use default contact form named “Contact form 1,” which you can use by embedding the following code into your web page wherever you want to use a contact form:
[ contact-form 1 "Contact form 1" ]
Hat tip Marcy Gerena: pointed out that the wording on the contact form explanation is unclear. Here’s a screenshot to make it clearer:
Default contact form
At the moment, Website In A Weekend is using only email and cell phone number on the Website In A Weekend contact page. These days, GMail is so good at filtering spam that I only get spam in my inbox once every couple of months. Since cold calling a Do-Not-Call list is illegal, and I don’t pick up “blocked” or “unknown” numbers, my phone traffic is reasonable as well.
2. About page
Your About page tells your readers and prospects important information about you, helping build trust in your products and services.
For most small businesses and personal websites, your “About” page should consist of one to three paragraphs explaining the purpose of the website, and how the reader will benefit from reading your website on a regular basis.
Check out the Website In A Weekend About page for an example.
3. Affiliations
Affiliations with personally trusted products and services help you make money from your website.
Most small businesses (Website In A Weekend included) are affiliated with bigger businesses that provide products and services beyond the scope of your business, but necessary or at least very useful for your customers. Many people who are familiar with the internet, web-based software, and with great technical experience often will not use affiliation links. A rare few take great personal exception that such links even exist. These people will not be your customers anyway, so don’t worry about them.
Affiliate marketing is has turned into a really big business in the last 3 years, and will continue to grow as the web continues to grow. It will become increasingly difficult to earn revenue with simple affiliate linking, so if affiliate marketing is your interest, in the future you will need to learn how to write effective sales copy.
Here’s Frank Kern’s example of a disclosure which I received in a Product Launch Formula promotion.
Some people go even further go even further, check out the John Chow disclosure policy.
You can surely find a middle ground. Here’s the Website In A Weekend disclosure policy.
4. Goals
Knowing your goals is the first key to success.
More about determining your goals for your website can be found in this article: Goals Page: Keep Your Website in Focus and On Track.
If you plan on doing business through the web, especially if you’re building a mailing list, you need the following three pages:
5. Privacy Policy
Respect customer data.
This should go without saying, but unless you plan on selling your list, you need to tell people otherwise. For example, Website In A Weekend will never sell or transmit subscriber information for any reason. And that’s made explicit in the privacy policy.
6. Disclaimer
Various occupations such as medicine, law, engineering and finance are highly regulated. You cannot provide advice in such fields without being officially credentialed by a state-sanctioned licensing body. Your disclaimer states that you are not responsible for people misconstruing your writing for such advice.
7. Terms & Conditions
Your website copy belongs to you, and you have the legal right to how customers and readers view or use your content. Check out the Website In A Weekend terms and conditions, and feel free to copy these to use for yourself. Just make sure to run it by your attorney first.
| Previous lesson | Next Lesson |
|---|---|
| Write out your goals for your website | Add Copyright Notice, Terms and Disclaimer |
First published February 19, 2009
Updated April 17, 2010
Republished April 18, 2010
Updated April 19, 2010
Updated June 12, 2010.
Had all of these items on my blog, but did forget about the copyright notice. It is indeed good to have one. Just updated my footer. Keep them coming Dave. RTd
.-= DiTesco´s last blog ..Promote Your Website: Free Advertising On iBlogZone =-.
You bet!
I need to update mine, now that I think of it. I recall putting it off until I could implement something I saw John Chow recommend.
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog ..Mailbag: Looking for recommendations for promoting cornerstone content =-.
Dave,
Some very good points, some of which I need to address. Others I’m not bothering with too much at the moment, like Adsense.
Thanks for the great tips.
Regards
Paul
I did minor upgrade over last couple of days on this article. I can see a major upgrade coming.
This is the only place I’ve ever used quoted subtitles under headers. I like it. I’m going to use it again.
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog ..Super or Total? Money Talks But Cache Rules =-.
Dave,
Valuable checklist … have quite a number of them missing so will have to add.
Once again … Thank you.
.-= Valentina´s last blog ..Sunday Morn Musings: Living the Life of Riley =-.
Let me know if I missed any!
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog ..Goals Page: Keep Your Website in Focus and On Track =-.
I would also add, but only because I saw it on 2 other successful blogs – a page where you reassure people that you are not going to spam them if they subscribe by email – I call it my “subscribe” page.
A top 25, 50 or 100 may also be a good page to have once your blog has 500+ articles. The “most popular” section of the sidebar may not be enough anymore.
.-= Tom@NetAccountant´s last blog ..How to make your website or blog faster and keep visitors – and Google – happy =-.
I have a Subscribe page! It’s for my AWeber list. And it needs to be rewritten very badly so I am not going to link to it right here.
Need to rewrite 30,000 words of content…
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog ..On Literary Pranks & Other Forms of Gentle Mischief =-.
You can get copyright from copyscape.com which I highly recommend.
But you can also get your blog copyrighted from my free copyright dot com, they will copyright up to 3 blog posts per day and send you a digital fingerprint. This is your proof and validation that your content is yours if you ever need to dispute someone who copies your content.
Great article, these are all must haves for bloggers. Note, if you live in the U.S. it is not enough to have a site-wide disclosure policy, you must actually have a full disclosure on each paid or sponsored article you write. Don’t think you are legally covered by having a Site Wide disclosure, (you should have one as well) but still have to post disclosure statements in all sponsored posts.
.-= Dragon Blogger´s last blog ..LeapFish 100K Cash Dash =-.
Justin, this is really good information, thanks for stopping by.
I’ll use these on the next rewrite of this article. There’s a website for generating disclosures as well that came about since I wrote this, I’ll add that as well.
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog ..Are You a Homeless Blogger? (You’re not alone) =-.
Don’t have them everywhere, you need readers to know which is sponsored content or not, and not assume everything you say is sponsored or you won’t be able to establish trust with your readers. Also, for disclosing paid posts you have to state exactly the compensation you received, if you were paid you have to state that, if you received a free gift, you have to state that. This makes it impossible to use a generic one size fits all disclosure, since you have to specifically say what was provided and who provided it in the disclosure.
You can find information on the FTC Gov website. I do sponsored articles for companies promoting and reviewing products and services, so this is why I know so much about this.
.-= Dragon Blogger´s last blog ..LeapFish 100K Cash Dash =-.
Wow!
That is _really_ cool!
I’m curious who drove this law, because it’s stupendously more “restrictive” than mainstream media rules.
If MSM was behind it, they messed up, because the rules you’re describing create instant trust in readers – at least, in me.
Whereas I don’t trust MSM at all. On anything.
Nicely summarised blog framework guide. You have managed to succinctly put what other bloggers have collectively taken 786.3 posts to cover so nice!.
I have created a tab on my nav bar for my pillar content category – is this the best way to give people access to my top stuff in your opinion?
.-= alex´s last blog ..So You Think You Can Dance? Loser! =-.
Alex, that’s a really good question. I’m in the middle of redesign here, and I’m asking myself the same sort of question.
Something that bugs the snot out of me is all the one-size-fits-all advice that goes hammering around the Blogistan Echo Chamber. Unless you have a crystal-clear picture in mind before starting out, I believe having to evolve the site design is inevitable, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog ..hRecipe – Semantic Recipes for WordPress (Google loves these) =-.
One item you didn’t mention but I think is worthwhile is a comment policy.
.-= Ned Carey´s last blog ..Purple Cow =-.
That’s a pretty good idea, Ned. Something for the next editorial iteration. I haven’t written out my commenting policy yet either.
.-= Dave Doolin´s last blog ..Super or Total? Money Talks But Cache Rules =-.
Dave,
Thank you Dave for the clarification and the quick response. The material is great and easy to follow for a novice like me.
Thanks again,
Marcy