Having your first website is not just about finding a developer or programmer or platform to develop/main a website on, but you really need to have some basic elements that every average visitor of your websites expects to have.
To look around these elements, we start with the number one website in the world, at the moment of writing this post, google.com.
Although it’s not the best example, since it’s too much known that it doesn’t necessarily have all the basic elements that we seek, however we will list them as we seek to find more.
Taking a look around, we find the following:
- Logo
- About
- Contact, it’s under About, but usually Contact comes as separate page/section
- Search
- Privacy Policy
- Terms of Use
- Login / Sign in – If your website offers services
- Other Services offered in other domains or subdomains
- Content suited for your location
- Solutions for different type of audience like Google for Business / Advertisers.
- Social networks – Share?
- Different offered languages – this is not basic, but let’s keep it for now.
- Settings / Preferences – Good if your website itself is an offered service.
- Favicon – the little icon you see in the Tab of your browser, yes it’s part of the website
It’s very good to take care of these visual items, however these are also other items that are not visual, but are very carnal and basic to every website:
- Purpose
- Content
- Audience or specifically target Audience
We probably missed many other elements since we were researching a service website, not a shopping or a products website.
To add more elements, we decided to research another well known website that focuses on different areas, Amazon.com, which is well known for shopping particularly in the USA.
We will not list elements that were previously discovered, so you won’t see Logo or Privacy items listed.
More elements:
- Menu (Mobile menu?)
- Categories – for products, and we can say also Sub-categories
- Shopping Cart
- Currency (+Currency Changer)
- Customer Service
- Daily Deals – It can be any top-rank top-sell top-search page
- Shortcuts – like back to top
- Country
- Sitemap or a whole list of direct services
We won’t get into further details like hidden items, typography and styles, we will keep that for another post, but it’s very good to read this post closely, and meditate on it, think about your ideas, categories, and good website structure before you begin working on your website.
Many website builders or businesses start their websites in an Agile mode – to let them grow a little by little, but sometimes basic elements are necessary for the minimum functionality of a website.
If you find an error in this article, please file a report, feel free to comment and contribute.
