(Reading time: 6 – 9 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.
It’s not difficult to implement any of these, especially when using WordPress:
- Contact form: your readers need to communicate back to you; make it easy for them.
- “Pillar” or “Flagship” content: timeless articles all visitors need to read.
- Categories: Like chapters in a book, help people find what they are looking for.
- Copyright notice: Your content is yours, protect it.
- About page: Help people understand “What’s In It For Me?”
- Affiliations: Make sure you disclose everything you promote. It’s the law.
- Links: If you don’t have it, point your readers where they can get it.
- Adsense: Just one way to advertise. Get your account, it’s worth having even if you don’t use it right away.
- Goals: You don’t have to tell anyone what you’re doing, but it helps.
- Legal: Terms and conditions, privacy policy, disclaimers; necessary evils for a professional website.
Let’s take a quick look at each.
Contact form
Using a contact form allows readers to contact you while protecting you from email spam.
Website-In-A-Weekend uses “Contact Form 7″ which is easily found using the builtin plugin search form: “Plugins > New.” The configuration page 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 is used by embedding this 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
“Pillar” or “Flagship” content
Pillar or Flagship content is what brings people to your website, providing useful information to your customers and prospects and driving sales.
More on pillar content can be found in How To Rapidly Create Pillar Content For Your Blog.
Categories
Categories help focus your blog writing, with the added benefit of helping search engines classify your web pages.
Categories help you focus on your vision of your website. When you choose categories that best describe your vision, it’s much easier to write articles that stay on track. On the other hand, if you write an article for your website, and it doesn’t seem to fit into your categories, perhaps that article is a bit “off-topic.”
Readers also find categories useful, especially on WordPress, which allows you to automatically provide a list of articles that are strictly within that category.
Search engines also use categories to help classify the content on your website. The exact mechanism search engines use is a trade secret… and probably for good reason: there’s as many people out there trying to spoof the search engines as are providing great content!
Copyright notice
Copyright notice helps inform readers you take your intellectual property seriously.
Copyright notices reside in the footer of each blog post and page and are included automatically. It’s smart to take the time to ensure that your copyright notices are accurate and up-to-date. While your work is automatically copyrighted when you write it, displaying a notice gives you a stronger case in court should you ever have to pursue legal redress. For really critical material, consider sending a copy to the Library of Congress (or the appropriate body in countries other than USA), which gives you even more legal protection.
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.
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.
Adsense
Adsense is Google’s advertising service. It’s not a big money maker for small website owners, and displaying Adsense advertisements may even detract from your credibility. Very large website operators with hundreds of websites can do very well with small payments and high traffic.
At the moment (March 2 2009), there seems to be some rumors floating around about Google shaking up the Adsense space. Stay tuned!
Links
Choose links carefully, based on business logic as well as personal intuition, to ensure potential loss of sales are offset by better customer experience.
For small personal websites not concerned with driving business traffic, links out from your website are a matter of whim and whimsy. For a small business website, outgoing links may represent potential loss of sales.
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.
Legal stuff
If you plan on doing business through the web, especially if you’re building a mailing list, you need the following three pages:
- Privacy Policy: 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.
- 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.
- Terms & Conditions: Your website copy belongs to you, and you have the legal right to how customers and readers view or use your content.
| 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, April 19, 2010, June 12, 2010.]
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{ 17 comments }
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
Paul´s last blog ..Keeping up with your homework
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
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