(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:

1. Contact form: your readers need to communicate back to you; make it easy for them.
2. About page: Help people understand “What’s In It For Me?”
3. Affiliations: Make sure you disclose everything you promote. It’s the law.
4. Goals: You don’t have to tell anyone what you’re doing, but it helps.
5. Privacy policy: Terms and conditions, privacy policy, disclaimers; necessary evils for a professional website.
6. Disclaimer:
7. 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.

First published February 19, 2009
Updated April 17, 2010
Republished April 18, 2010
Updated April 19, 2010
Updated June 12, 2010.