The basic premise behind web design and web designers is to create websites for the World Wide Web. Five years ago small to medium sized web agencies would create five page websites for companies so they had a presence online. Now the web allows a company to position themselves as an authoritative source in their industry whilst providing an opportunity to interact with both current and new customers. Services such as Google Analytics have allowed companies to quantify any online spend by tracking number of visitors, where their geographically located and what pages they have viewed. Whilst 'going digital' presents a lot of opportunities it is a constantly evolving beast so it can sometimes be difficult to understand what is achievable or what is possible.
With this in mind I have listed the top 5 undiscovered web design features:
1. Online surveys: Your business succeeds by listening to what your customers want. What better way to understand what your potential customers want or what current customers think to your service and any ideas they might have than by implementing an online survey. There are two ways you can go with surveys; by using a tool such as Survey Monkey which allows you to create custom questionnaires yourself but doesn't allow you to skin the questionnaire to your branding or employ a web design agency to create a custom questionnaire tailored to your needs which can be styled to fit with your company's branding and sit on your domain.
2. Customer ratings: If your site already receives a good amount of traffic then allowing customers who purchase products online to rate those products and their experience provides valuable feedback for you and other potential customers. As long as that feedback is positive it can make the difference between purchasing a product from you or one of your competitors. This shouldn't just apply to products but services as well - what if your local Chinese takeaway incentivised customers to rate their meals online so that you could see a top 10 list of favourite Chinese meals? This would allow you as the customer to discover new meals that you might not have ever tried.
3. Straw Polls: This is similar to an online survey but it is generally limited to one multiple choice question. Straw polls can be set-up to provide real-time results to entrants providing a greater customer experience. Questions can range from asking potential customers their views on current affairs to what they think to your website or their views on a new website feature you are thinking about implementing.
4. News/RSS feeds: Perhaps you're a small company that don't have the time to write about industry events or you're a larger company creating industry news and you're looking for a way to share it, either way a news feed in the form of an RSS feed is for you. If you're a small company you can add a news feed onto your site displaying current industry news fed from a larger more authoritative site. If you're a larger site, offering your RSS feed to complimentary sites will propel your presence online.
5. Promotional codes: Promotional codes are particularly useful because they allow both online and offline marketing to be tracked and therefore optimised. For example If you run a print campaign incentivising readers to go on-line and enter a promotional code you can track the effectiveness of that print campaign with online tools!
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