Making a successful website is, at best, difficult and time consuming. Firstly, you need to make sure you are targeting the right market to generate thousands (if not millions) of impressions monthly. You need to set it up for social media and do many many other things in order to get the website up and running. The great thing about successful websites is that they tend to have some key fundamental things all the same. With this in mind, here are three things every single successful website will have in common so that if you have not implemented one of the below, you can make sure to do it.
 
 

A Great Theme

The first step to a successful website is in having a great theme. Now, with this, you can either choose to use a ‘stock’ theme and tweak it to the way you want it to look or use a professional developer to develop a theme for you.
In the past, I tended to go for option one since it was a lot cheaper as stock themes tended to be free. However, I wasted a huge amount of time trying to tweak themes and trying to learn coding in order to tweak the themes the way I wanted them to look. Long story short is that it really did not work out. Therefore, although it is going to initially cost you more to begin with, hiring a professional or buying a professional theme is the best way to go and it is the way successful websites will tend to go down too.
 
 

About and Contact Pages

When web users come to a website, they do not always just look at the content you have published. Human beings are, by nature, curious. For this reason, it is always important to have an about page and a contact page to share with web users a little bit about the history of your website and what it does as well as giving web users a portal to contact you through.
With this, creating a good about page requires some careful planning:

• The about page is all about sharing your website’s story. People want to know about your website (or you, if you are a personality blogger).
• Do not advertise anything on your about page since you do not want to give web users any incentive to go off that page and not read the about page if they were enticed enough to go onto the page in the first place.
• Use a few images. Taking images from the past to help tell the story in the about page really does work well when accompanied by content.

For the contact page, this is a little easier since the best contact pages are generally quite simple. If you are unsure what to form boxes to include, as a norm, you will tend to see the following structure for ‘Contact’ forms:

1. Name
2. Email address
3. Subject
4. Message
5. Security check
6. Send

As well as this, it is also to have a small paragraph above the content form telling web users when they are likely hear back from you and what the contact form is generally used for by web users – a bit like PPC.org’s contact form!