When trying to market yourself online, you have the ability to demonstrate yourself as a credible source. What's interesting is how many people and companies don't maximize this opportunity that Al Gore built for us online.

There are some key components that every website should contain. If your website doesn't include these elements, then you are missing out on opportunities.

What is especially amazing is how many web designers and marketers don't have these basic elements on their websites.

Phone Number Clearly Visible

For this, we'll make the assumption that you want to talk to your customers. Some companies have the business model that they don't like to talk to their customers. It's those same companies that invariably someone will complain about their lack of customer service.

If you want to sell things to your clients, you should have your phone number prominent and obvious. Make it easy for people to get a hold of you. Yes, people are utilizing chat, social media and email more and more, but most people still want to have a phone number.

Contact Page That Makes Sense

A contact page should also contain your phone number. Personally, I believe your contact page should also have your physical address. It adds credibility to your outfit.

I know that sometimes you want to work out of your home. But, let's face it, no matter how much play working remotely gets in the news, it's just not as professional. It causes a flicker of thought of, "Oh, you can't afford an office?"

If you don't have a physical address, you should at least get a virtual office and an address. It's a great place to meet your clients away from your home. It's okay to work out of your home but you should have an address away from home as a business location and a virtual office is a very inexpensive way to do that.

Incidentally, you should also meet your vendors at your virtual office. They are a great source of leads if they understand you are truly a professional.

About Page

I'm amazed how frequently I don't see an about page on a website. I want to do a little research about you. I want to understand your background. I want to know if you are a company or an individual.

Most people are okay with the fact that you might be a solo operator. People want to know who you are and how you do it. It becomes very disingenuous to try to hide or obscure your company history or makeup. If you pretend you are bigger than you really are then people will begin to wonder what else you are hiding.

Your about link doesn't have to be a prominent link in your main navigation but you should have a link so people can learn more about your company. They need to know you are real and not some fly by night operation.

The format of your about page can be a simple history and philosophy or can go so far as to include employee biographies. The more you give your prospective clients, the more you'll be able to connect with people in a real way.

Clear Call To Action

Oh, how often this is forgotten. When I come to your website, I want you to tell me what I should be doing there. I need to know what your expectation is for me. If you don't tell me then I won't do it.

The sales performance of your website should be considered the sales performance of a sales person. You should read my previous post, "How to Sell to Me," so that you can understand a little more what I mean. If you treat your website as a sales person and not a thing then you might do a little better building it.

Blog, Blog, Blog

You need to demonstrate your brilliance and ability. You do this by being active on your website with updated content. If you have a constantly changing product offering then this is less important. If your website would otherwise be pretty stagnant, an updated blog will make all the difference.

When your website doesn’t have a change in a very long time it signals to your clients that you don't care. You don't care about giving information that is helpful. You don't care about getting your message out. In turn, it means you may not be attentive to them.

Oh, and don't forget, when you blog often, you are also setting yourself up for long term search engine success.

Don't Be Embarrassed

I know that often times the goal is to try to portray something that you are not. If you are tiny, you want people to think you are bigger than you are. I can appreciate that to a certain extent. I understand that if you are starting your consulting practice or design agency that you might not be able to afford a staff to help you out.

Stop trying to hide behind the lack of appropriate content but instead, double down on being more visible. Yes, it might take more hours. It might be hard work. But, if you aren't going to put in the work on your website (or hire it out - like my agency) then you probably don't deserve to be in business because you will set up doubts in your prospective clients' minds as to your ability to do what you say you can do.

Be proud of who you are. Proclaim it on your website and make it easy for your clients and prospective clients to find you.

I've been building websites professionally for about six years. Before that, I spent plenty of time in design, marketing and business.

Over my career in the last 18 years, I've been very careful to make sure that I focus on being the best I can. I've always wanted to understand the nuance of everything. When I was a color systems specialist, I learned everything I could about color. When I studied a foreign language, I memorized grammar books and now that my company builds websites, I focus on understanding what it takes to build great websites.

Sometimes, I'm truly amazed at what so-called professionals get away with. I'm amazed at what designers and developers get away with and consider it a completed project.

Recently I was asked to review a project that was considered technically ready to go live. In about 15 minutes, I was able to identity the 25 glaring items that indicated that the site was nowhere near ready to go live. In fact, the reason it took 15 minutes was because I had to take time to create the punchlist in such a way that the developer would understand why he needed to fix them.

I figured I would take an opportunity to point out the top six things I see on site after site that no self-respecting designer or developer should ever leave out before he considers a web project complete. If your web guy hasn't taken the time to handle these things properly, then he's not done his job.

I recognize there are varying philosophies. I think these six items are basic enough that they shouldn't be missed. If you see an occasional issue, I wouldn't stress. It's a problem when you see a pattern.

Head Information

The head information is information is the code between the head tags. You won't see the code but you'll see some glaring things that will be obvious when you know what to look for.

• Title Tag - The title is at the top of the browser window. It should be reflective of what is on the page and different from page to page. On very inexpensive sites, you'll probably see this as the same from page to page because it takes time. It should at least be indicative of the website's purpose. Most importantly, it shouldn't be stuffed with too many keywords.
• Favicon - The favicon is the little icon that you'll see in the brower's url or tab. This is very often forgotten or done wrong. You'll see it missing if it's done wrong (and obviously if it's forgotten).
• Meta Description - Most search engines don't care about this anymore but when you post to Facebook or LinkedIn, it will auto-pull the description. If it's not done right then you'll get unpredictable results.

URL Strategy

This is one of my biggest pet peeves. When using a content management system such as Wordpress or Drupal (our favorite) the URLs have a default that is not smart. In Wordress the URL will be elements of the date (/2013/05/01/title) and in Drupal the URL will be /content/title.

The problem is that website navigation is more complicated than that. Your website visitors need to be able to know where they are in multiple ways. The URL is one key way they can do this.

Let me give you an example. In a Drupal website, if you create a default blog post, the blog post will be at http://www.yoursite.com/content/your-blog-title. The problem is that unless you make your blog title have the word of blog in it, no one will know it's a blog. In fact, if you just go to /content (take off /your-blog-title) it might take you to a page that shows all the content on the website. In many situations like this it will take you to a 404 page-not-found error.

For blog posts, your URLs should be /blog/your-blog-title. Then at /blog, you should see a listing of all your blog posts. Your URLs for news posts should be /news/your-news-title with /news being a list of all your news articles. And so forth.

More complex content strategies need more complex URL strategies. Most designers don't consider this at all.

Links and Link Colors

When your website visitors come to your website, they need to know how to navigate. If it's a link, it needs to look like a link. If it's not a link, it shouldn't look like a link. All your link colors should be consistent. You might have different colors for different purposes but once you establish your rule for your website, you need consistency.

A good test is that if you look at your website and can't quickly identify the links on a page then you've done it wrong. Understand, however, there are times when you'll want an exception to that rule. But, you have to know why you are having an exception.

www Redirect

Back in the beginning days of the interwebs, we started using the www at the beginning of our domains. It really doesn't serve much practical purpose but it's the world we live in. The challenge is when www.domain.com and domain.com don't point to the same place. Not only does this cause problems for the search engines but it has the potential of showing your website visitors two different websites.

Logo Linking Home

It has become a common convention that your logo should link to your home page. When it doesn't link to your home page, your visitors may get frustrated at not quickly finding a way back to your home page.

Top Level Menu Items

Another common convention is that the top-level menu items for drop down menus should link somewhere. People expect that every item in the menu link somewhere. When you leave the top-level menu to just be a place for people to hover over to see the links below them you'll find that some people will have a hard time navigating your website. Use this link as a landing page for the items underneath. Give them a summary so if and when they click they can have a reason to click again.

Bottom Line

I think that the one key bottom line here is that there are simple things that can give your website the polish that can take it from meh to totally acceptable. These things won't fix bad copy or terrible design but at least your website will incorporate some of the key elements that all modern websites should. If your website doesn't have these basic elements, and your web guy doesn't fix them quickly for you, you should probably fire him