5 Website Features Every Business Website NEEDS.

It has been an insane year for tech. Between the mass adoption of generative AI, augmented and virtual reality advancements, among other innovations, it is clear that this train has kicked it into high gear.

The same is true for the modern web. In my world as a software engineer and entrepreneur, I keep my ear close to the floor to stay informed on the latest and greatest tooling so that I can make sure that the product I’m providing to my client not only solves their problem, but is also built with the future in mind.

The modern web is always changing, and what many business owners don’t realize is that their website is often the first point of contact for a potential client. And if you’re leaving them with a bad user experience, you’re leaving money on the table. Bad web design doesn’t just stop at small businesses either — have you used Best Buy’s website lately? Yeah, me neither — because it sucks.

If you’re a business owner, I want to see you crush it with your online presence. I’m not talking about some flashy design, but rather functionality that WORKS.

So here are 5 valuable strategies that I use with my web development agency to make sure my clients leave a lasting impression on their online audience.

Responsiveness

As much as this developer would like to think that most of the world is looking at websites on desktop — sadly it’s not true. We live in a 24/7, on-the-go world. All of us have supercomputers in our pockets that deliver us memes, tiktoks, and are the primary way we browse the web.

Simply put, your website better look fking good on mobile.

But I like to think beyond just looking good. What about the experience? We interact with touch devices differently than a laptop, so that opens up creativity for the way that information is displayed.

For example, maybe you have a section of tabs that the user can interact with on desktop. Why not consider making that section into cards that the user can tap or swipe through on mobile?

Accessibility

I have to admit: even as a software engineer for over 5 years, this one still gets me from time to time. Accessibility features are often overlooked during development. What am I talking about here?

Have you ever uploaded a picture to your site and it had two fields to fill out:

• Image Name

• Alt-Text

The Alt-Text is the important one. Displayed in HTML below, alt tags allow screen readers to describe a picture to someone with visual impairment.

<img src="somepicture.com" alt="some cool picture" />

Extra bonus tip: Accessibility is great for SEO. So don’t forget those alt-tags!

Server Side Rendering = Better SEO

Look. Everybody and their mother are using React to build on the modern web, but I highly advise against it for your marketing website. You see, React uses something called Client Side Rendering, which means that all of the HTML on the page is generated when you load the page. This is not good for SEO.

Usually with a business website, I lean towards tooling that provides some level of Server Side Rendering, or SSR (Astro, Next.js). Reason being is that it is much more easily read by search crawlers for SEO.

Now, I’m all for dynamic user experiences, so it is definitely okay to sprinkle some CSR throughout (like in our card example), but try to leave headers, titles, important paragraphs, and footers on the server.

API’s and Integrations

Today, you can access just about any type of data you want via an API. So why not have your website talk with the rest of your tech stack?

• Maybe you want your contact form to push lead data to a Hubspot account.

• Perhaps you also want to trigger an email to the lead and assign them to an email campaign vertical, delivering more relative content and brand awareness.

• Maybe you have video content on your Youtube channel or a blog on Beehiiv, but want to display it on your website so that the user doesn’t have to navigate away from the website to consume the content.

• Perhaps you have an ecommerce store and would like a user to easily buy a product without having to navigate away from the marketing site using the Stripe or Shopify API for easy checkout.

Whatever your mind can conjure up, the web is there to deliver. Think about ways that you can enhance the user experience with integrations.

Well, there you have it. 5 strategies to launching your online presence into the stratosphere, and giving your audience a great impression.

Paps.