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All effective websites designed for personal or business promotion, marketing, branding or sales have common features, including:
- Contact form
- “Pillar” or “Flagship” content
- Categories
- Copyright notice
- About page
- Affiliations
- Links
- Adsense
- Goals
- Legal
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" ]
“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 Pillar content: the top 6 links on Google.
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 credential by a state-sanctioned licensing body. You 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.
Similar Posts:
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- DIY WordPress: How To Add A Copyright Notice To A WordPress Theme
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