Every business needs a website. A website represents your online identity, a channel that helps customers from all around the world connect with you. Depending on the nature of your business, you need to get the right type of website. For example, not every layout and feature is suitable for an e-commerce website. To help you get the proper setup and connect with your clients, let’s discuss what type of website is right for your business.
Elements that define your website
The first step in understanding what type of website is adequate for you is to see what elements define it. You need to focus on:
the purpose of the website;
features and required pages;
type of service;
By defining these three elements, you will be able to easily pick the suitable layout and the type of your website.
What types of a website exist?
Here are the types of websites you can choose from:
homepages;
e-commerce;
magazine websites;
portfolio websites;
blogs;
landing pages;
contact pages and directories;
social media websites;
Let’s discuss each of these types, and see how they can contribute to your business.
Homepages
A homepage website helps customers get to know what your business is about. It focuses on a clear navigation layout and information sharing. While it can come in many forms, the primary purpose is to educate visitors about what you do and gain their attention. Furthermore, it helps them get to other sections of the website.
When designing a homepage, it is best to use a minimalistic design. Too many colors and elements can quickly grab too much attention, shifting the focus from the more essential things.
E-commerce
An e-commerce website is the best channel for making online sales. If your business is selling products online, this is what you want. With e-commerce websites, it all comes down to the product display. You need a concise catalog with all information. Furthermore, the shopping cart options also play a crucial role here. Depending on how you are selling products, you might need a currency converter, an option to calculate taxes and shipping, and so on.
E-commerce websites also need to be optimized for mobile phones.
A crucial thing about e-commerce websites is that they should not be confusing to the buyer in any way. For example, a complex signup process or the lack of credit card security will turn them away. If they cannot clearly navigate the website, they will go elsewhere. Consulting a design expert is wise in this case because they will help you not make any mistakes with the website layout.
Magazine websites
Welcome to the world of beautiful photos and photo galleries. The entire layout of a magazine website needs to focus on the quick display of high-quality images. Photo galleries require interesting transitions and display options. That’s why it’s all about the framework of your website. Since the photos will be the main actor here, you need to make them shine above everything else.
Portfolio websites
Whatever your line of work is, if you are a creative professional trying to show your skills and find work, you need a portfolio website. The purpose of this type is to showcase your abilities. Focus on your best projects, and let your customers see what you can do. You also need a good contact page to communicate with potential clients.
Blogs
Blog websites are probably the most popular type of websites today. This is what every writer needs. Since the primary purpose here is to let visitors read articles, it all comes down to presenting the text clearly. Furthermore, you should focus on finding the right font for your website.
Out of all website types, a blog is the most popular form of all.
Another crucial element is using images in the right way. Endless walls of text can sometimes be boring, so break them up with a few captivating pictures that contribute to the overall story.
Landing pages
This type of website is for you if you need your clients to take action. Landing pages also focus on minimalistic design because all attention needs to be directed towards the Call-To-Action button. This is the most efficient type to use for a marketing campaign. Remember that the website should not be boring but engaging.
If this is what your business needs, WP Full Care offers excellent solutions.
Contact pages and directories
If your company connects clients with other businesses, you need a contact website or a directory. A good example is TripAdvisor. The idea is to present a repository of other businesses and have a way to give them a grade. You need to direct visitors to the best service provider. Thus, focus on displaying enough information so they can make an informed decision. If the directory type of website is the best choice for you, you also need a comments system that allows visitors to share their experiences.
Social media websites
The social media type of website is right for your business if you need to tend to a considerable subscriber or follower base. Social media platforms are home to almost 3 billion people. Therefore, it is crucial to know what platforms your clients mostly use and design your website using the same layout and colors. It needs to resemble something familiar. Furthermore, when creating content, you need to add options to share it on social media. This is why they are here.
Types of websites and their purpose
Let’s outline what the main types of websites are and what purpose hides behind the design:
homepages – mainly used by brands but other businesses as well. The idea is to let the visitors learn about who you are and what you do;
e-commerce – sell products to customers;
magazine websites – focus on image display;
portfolio websites – perfect for showing your projects and skills to find clients;
blogs – for people who want to share articles;
landing pages – for marketing campaigns that utilize CTA buttons to get visitors to take action;
contact pages/directories – to display a repository of businesses your clients might need;
social media websites – they focus on creating shareable social media content;
Different business purposes require different website layouts and elements.
What type of website is right for your business – explained!
Hopefully, you now understand what type of website is right for your business. Keep in mind that your business might require a mix of 2 or 3 different layouts. If that is the case, do not focus on just one type; mix them, and create a unique experience for your customers.
If you want to rank better in search engine results, you will need proper link building for your website. This is still one of the essential elements of every SEO campaign. Links are one of the major factors search engines use when evaluating websites and should not be neglected. On the contrary, you will need to place great effort in building quality links, both external and internal. With a good strategy, your pages will rank better, and your website will benefit from it. Finally, a strong link profile can be crucial, especially for business websites.
Basics of link building for your website
In simple words, link building is the process of increasing the number of quality links to and from your website. This can be done by producing quality content and placing links to your pages inside. In general, it includes writing reviews of products, helpful articles, guides. Either you or other parties can create content on their website. Then, you use links to connect to particular pages, products, or services on your website. However, if you want to have a user-friendly and appealing website, link building takes significant time and effort.
Consider SEO professionals
Since it takes a serious amount of time to build quality links, you should consider hiring SEO professionals. Even with a good initial investment, it can take a lot of time before the first results appear. That’s why it’s essential to have people with experience like the guys at linkdepartment.com, who specialize in building links and know all the caveats and strategies about how to do it properly. With experts who know how to do it properly, your website will undoubtedly acquire top positions in search results. This is especially important if your business website belongs to a highly competitive industry.
Make a solid link building plan
Before starting your link-building campaign, you have to set your goals carefully. But, to plan a good SEO strategy, your goals should be realistic. Planning to build over a thousand links in a short time and see results instantly is not possible. Even if it is, you shouldn’t do it. Your link building has to be oriented toward the constant growth of the number of links over time. Otherwise, search engines might interpret it as spamming and issue penalties to your website. With a proper strategy, you will steadily increase the traffic to your website, have more leads, and achieve great results in the long run. This is a significant achievement for those who sell products or services.
Identifying your target audience for links
While making plans, take the opportunity to identify your target audience, but not only your final customers. Try to predict who would be interested in sharing links with you. If there are authoritative representatives in your niche, they might be a good opportunity. Also, consider other websites that would be willing to partner up with you. In general, if you have a product, think of it as who can be interested in promoting any content connected to it.
Types of links
When planning your link-building strategy, think about the types of links you are trying to acquire. Some of the basic types include:
homepage links
links containing your brand name
links pointing to specific articles
those with particular keywords in focus
For any combination of links above, you will need to do a complete market analysis. It’s a tedious but necessary step to check your competitors. And see if it’s worth even trying some of the keywords, for example.
Finally, don’t forget about your internal links. It’s required to have a good internal link structure for two reasons. Firstly, it will connect pages into one coherent and user-friendly website. Secondly, it will help search engines to crawl your pages easily.
Monitor links
You cannot plan a strategy properly without previously evaluating your website condition. In this case, your link profile is what interests you the most. Therefore, you will need to analyze and continuously monitor your links. This way, you will know how to proceed, and most importantly, which errors to correct in the future when they occur. There are many useful tools and complete SEO solutions you can use to track the process. Here are some of them:
Serpstat
SEMrush
Ahrefs
Majestic SEO.
Eventually, you can automatize the entire process because you will constantly be working on improving your website.
Audit your links every few months to stay on track
Useful methods of link building for your website
Explore the competition
One of the first steps toward a successful link-building strategy is to check what your competitors are doing. To avoid any waste of time, it’s always better to check what is working and for whom. Analyze all your competitors and see where your place can be and how to improve.
Reach out to bloggers
Find blogs in your niche that might be interested in linking back to your website. There are many influential people in each industry whose links are worth a lot. To build a network of quality links, you will need to establish a relationship with them first.
Create your own blog
One of the best link building techniques is to create your own blog. For example, if you sell products, an article describing your product would be a perfect material for your website. You will eventually attract more visitors and open new opportunities for interlinking with other websites. Also, don’t forget to promote your blog on other channels properly.
Create quality content Overall, high-quality content is the best way to acquire links naturally. These links are probably the most valuable type you can have in your link profile. To do it, you need to provide useful, optimized, explanatory, and easily digestible content that will engage your audience.
You will need a visually appealing website and content as well.
Guest posting
This is one of the most time-consuming methods but can get you great results. Guest post on other websites, and allow guest posting. When done on the right websites, it can significantly help you increase ranking positions and build relationships with other websites.
Increase your social media presence
Create accounts on trendy social media and mirror your content. This is an excellent way of promotion and a way to reach a wide audience who might be interested in what you offer. People share everything, which can be a powerful tool to spread the word about your website and business quickly.
Social Media can provide your website with numerous benefits
As you can see, starting link building for your website can be quite an endeavor. However, even though it might seem like that at first, it’s not so frightening. Of course, it will take you a lot of time to build a quality link profile. Fortunately, you can always look for help from SEO professionals who are more than willing to offer assistance. In a reasonable amount of time, you will start seeing the first results and push toward success.
I haven’t decided yet if this is the final tenet in The Customer Code or the “platform” that supports the entire Code. But I think it’s the most important of all — do the right thing, even when it’s hard … especially when it’s hard.
But it’s the difficulty and the rarity that makes this work valuable.
Doing the hard things is an opportunity to differentiate ourselves and stand out.
At HubSpot, we talk about wanting to build a business that we’re proud of and that has long-lasting positive impact. We won’t achieve that by just doing the easy things.
At the start of the series I wrote about how growth alone doesn’t interest me anymore. I want HubSpot to grow, but more importantly, I want us to grow better. I want us to grow in a way that is good for our customers, partners, and employees.
That’s what The Customer Code is all about. It’s an attempt to create a sort of “code of conduct” that defines how we run our business, and early indicators are that it is working. In our annual planning and in our investments and product decisions, one question keeps coming up: “Does this approach support the tenets of the Customer Code?”
For years we’ve talked about “Solving for the customer.” It’s been a pillar of our philosophy, but it always felt a bit nebulous. The Customer Code is how we now turn that philosophy into practice. It’s how we hold ourselves accountable to do the right thing, even when it’s hard, complicated, expensive, or time-consuming.
In the same way that The Culture Code gave us common language to describe how we as individuals work with each other, the Customer Code is giving us a common language to describe how we as teams and leaders solve for our customers.
So I hope you’ll join us. Either in adopting the Customer Code or creating a code that makes sense for your customers and business.
Every business seeks to grow, but doing the right thing for customers, even when it’s hard (especially when it’s hard) is how we grow better. The Customer Code makes sure we here at HubSpot keep on doing the hard things.
We believe the world has changed. We see businesses using more kinds of software, not less, that all needs to work together. To help our customers grow better in this environment, HubSpot is evolving from an “all-in-one” suite into an “all-on-one” platform.
Delivering remarkable end-to-end customer experiences is a team sport. Our goal in becoming a lovable platform is to make it easy to complement HubSpot with a rich landscape of apps built by other companies, or custom apps built uniquely for your business by an agency or your own developers.
We want to make it easy for our customers to orchestrate all of this.
In collaboration with our growing collection of platform partners, we made great progress in that mission over the past year. Here are our platform highlights from 2018:
1. We listed 94 new apps in our directory, growing our platform partner ecosystem by 70%.
Good platforms are flywheels: More customers attract more developers, who build more apps, which attract more customers, and so on. Customers get an ever wider set of capabilities, while developers get an ever wider audience they can distribute their apps to.
That flywheel is starting to accelerate on our platform, and it’s inspiring to see the wide variety of innovative companies who are bringing new integrated apps to our customers.
We welcomed 94 new official apps into our ecosystem in 2018, bringing our integrations count to over 200 across 17 categories, that help grow our customers’ businesses.
One of the categories that grew the most in 2018 was Calling. Just within that category, you can find 21 different apps for video conferencing, integrating with cloud-based phone systems and call centers, inbound and outbound SMS, voice-powered chatbots, AI-driven analysis of phone calls, and more.
In 2018, the top 20 most popular apps in our ecosystem by total number of installs were:
As you might expect, many of these were our earliest partners, and it’s great to see their continued success. But we were also excited to see new partners quickly gain traction. The 10 fastest-growing new apps in our ecosystem last year were:
Many more exciting apps are in the pipeline now and will be launching over the course of 2019.
We also built a number of native integrations last year, including Zoom, Slack, Shopify, Stripe, Youtube, and Workplace by Facebook.
We deliberately invest in a small number of native integrations relative to our ecosystem’s size. This allows us to focus our developers’ time on the handful of companies that we know will be the most valuable for our customers. For instance, we were launch partners for some of Slack’s new APIs, enabling a deep integration between our two products. We were a launch partner for Workplace by Facebook. And we built a groovy new YouTube integration for actionable video metrics.
Whenever we build an integration ourselves, we look for ways to enable other partners in our ecosystem to build off those same extension points. For instance, when we built our Shopify integration, we also created the Ecommerce Bridge API, which enables companies to sync and manipulate ecommerce data using HubSpot functionality. One of our integration partners, Unific, enables customers to connect their Magento, Shopify, Bigcommerce, or WooCommerce store to HubSpot using this API. We also recently added a tight integration with Zoom and are working to make it possible for other video conferencing providers to plug into HubSpot in the same way.
2. We added 95 new API endpoints and hosted our first annual platform partner day.
Our product teams have been enthusiastically opening more APIs and UI extension points to enable developers to build and integrate more kinds of apps on our platform.
Last year, we added 95 new API endpoints (for a total of 355), creating programmatic access to tickets, products, line items, CRM pipelines, GDPR compliance features, and more. We launched an Ecommerce Bridge API and Analytics API to facilitate deeper integrations with a wide range of partners in ecommerce and analytics categories. And we unveiled a new Workflow Extensions model that lets partners create branded, native-like actions for customers within workflows across our Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and Service Hub products.
Last spring, we also hosted our first annual Platform Partner Day at our headquarters in Cambridge. Over 60 of our top integration partners joined us to meet with our engineering and marketing teams, learn about upcoming product releases, and discuss how we can jointly create better apps and integrations for our shared customers.
We’re now gearing up for our second annual Platform Partner Day this spring with exciting new developments to share and even greater opportunities to collaborate.
3. Customers adopted integrations at a record pace.
There’s a positive correlation between the number of apps a customer connects to HubSpot and their growth on our platform. It makes sense: The more our customers invest in a unified experience for their customers, the more they can accomplish.
App adoption across our customer base in 2018 was record-breaking. The vast majority of our customers now have at least one other app integrated with HubSpot, and the average number of apps per customer jumped by more than 50% year-over-year. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of additional app installs.
We’re energized by this number, which indicates that customers are seeing benefits from our platform. But it’s also exciting for our platform partners who are seeing greater adoption among our customer base.
4. We connected our platform partners, agencies, and startups.
Some of the most valuable opportunities we can offer platform partners are connections with programs and communities across HubSpot.
For instance, our global network of thousands of agencies and consultants helps businesses leverage our software to grow better. Increasingly, these providers are adding our platform partners’ products to the solutions they’re delivering to clients. This gives their clients more capabilities, expands their own service offerings, and lays the foundation for a powerful go-to-market channel.
To facilitate these types of relationships, we launched the Apps for Agency Services program last spring. It provides a structured way for platform partners who qualify to help agencies sell and service their software, including sales enablement tools and a free subscription for their own internal use.
HubSpot for Startups is another thriving program partners with over 1,500 accelerators, incubators, and VC firms (like Y Combinator and Sequoia Capital) to provide startups with educational resources, event programs, and startup-friendly discounts on our software.
To further build momentum between our platform partners and startup community, our platform marketing team researched the most commonly used apps for startups in our ecosystem and curated collections of apps for startups and free apps (including those with a freemium offering) in our directory.
We were inspired by all the successful connections between platform partners, agencies, and startups that happened last year. We’re committed to facilitating even more of them in the year ahead.
5. We launched HubSpot Ventures and announced co-investment from Amazon Web Services (AWS) in programs to grow our ecosystem.
In addition to expanding our platform’s APIs and extensibility and creating new app distribution opportunities for partners, we also made a couple of big announcements about growing the ecosystem itself.
In December, we launched HubSpot Ventures, a new $30 million fund to invest in startups that align with our mission to help millions of organizations grow better. Some of the previous investments that we have made include Blissfully, Grow, Lorem, Privy and Terminus.
At the same time, we announced a three-year commitment with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help startups grow better. All AWS Activate members have access to HubSpot for Startups and AWS now offers Activate memberships and credits to participants in HubSpot for Startups too. AWS will also support HubSpot’s platform partner program by co-investing to build an ecosystem for HubSpot partners, including content tailored to developers.
And, in the spirit of investing in our platform partners, we also extended HubSpot for Startups discounts to all certified platform partners who aren’t yet HubSpot customers but want to make the switch.
Onward and Upward in 2019
We’ve got big plans for our platform ecosystem in the year ahead. For customers, we’re eager to bring you more apps and integrations that will expand your business’s digital superpowers. To see the latest ones, check out the new and noteworthy category in our directory.
For partners, we’re dedicated to creating more opportunities for you to build your business on our platform. Last year, our entire executive team went on a field trip to learn from some of the best platform companies in the Bay Area. Our overarching takeaway was this credo: A platform should be measured by the success of its ecosystem. In 2018, we added three key hires to our team who are specifically tasked with helping our ecosystem succeed. Samantha Ceppos, our director of global partner and platform marketing, scales our ecosystem and ensures our partners are always looped in to changes and updates. Elizabeth Ruscitto, our director of developer relations, is leading the charge in improving our developer documentation, tools, and support. You can access our latest resources and sign up for a developer portal for free here. Hugh Durkin, our director of platform partner success, is focused on shaping our platform partner program to help partners grow their businesses within our ecosystem.
If you want to see an otherwise calm and collected person switch to blind rage, ask them about a time they tried to cancel a service.
Ask me about my attempts to cancel cable.
My colleague’s gym only allowed cancellations if you showed up in-person, during business hours.
And don’t even get me started on the nightmare of cancelling magazine subscriptions.
We’ve all had these experiences. They are universally loathed, and we remember them — and still get angry! — one, five, even 10 years after they have happened.
But there is often a gap between what we know as a person, and what we do as a business.
Recently our COO, JD Sherman, told me about a meeting he had with one of our customer success managers. She was nearly in tears as she told him about a customer she loved working with, who also loved working with her. They’d had a long and successful relationship together. But they were in a difficult situation as a business and needed to downgrade.
The customer missed the contractual window for downgrading, and because our customer success team is incentivized on revenue retention, she was put in the position of placing her needs and the company’s needs above the customer’s.
Legally, she had everything on her side. Personally, she knew it was wrong.
At the end of their conversation, her customer said, “Okay, you’ve got me. I’ll pay, but after we’re done with this I don’t ever want to work with you again.”
Wow. I am so sorry — to both our customer and our employee.
The goals we had in place for our customer success team forced them to solve for revenue dollars instead of the success of our customers.
We were blocking the exit even though it meant destroying the relationship.
Jason Lemkin says concisely what we as humans know to be true, but we as business leaders too often forget:
If I can make a purchase with one click, I should be able to cancel that purchase with one click.
If a company makes it easy to buy, they should make it easy to stop buying.
And I’m not just saying this because it’s the right thing to do; it’s also better for business.
The HubSpot Research team asked, and 89% of consumers reported they are more likely to buy if a company makes it easy and simple to cancel.
If a customer’s meant to be, they’ll be. If they’re not meant to be, let them be.
The 9th tenet of The Customer Code is: Don’t block the exit. I give HubSpot a 7 out of 10 on this. We’ve done a lot in just the past year to improve here. Most notably, we reduced our cancellation notice window from 45 days to 10 days, but we’re not finished yet.
I want customers to be able to cancel or downgrade with a click of the button. My hope is that the experience of leaving HubSpot feels more like quitting Netflix and Spotify than it feels like cancelling a business contract — or a cable subscription.
Not only do I want it to be easy for customers to stop paying us money, I want it to be easy for customers to take their data with them. Today, we support exports of key CRM objects. In 2019, we want to support the export of all activities associated with those exports. If it can be brought into HubSpot, we want customers to be able to take it out of HubSpot.
I don’t want anything blocking the exit, because when we block the exit, we also block the return.
This solves for customers and it solves for employees. And any change that is good for both of those groups is ultimately good for the company.
We all know that companies that retain customers grow. But companies that gracefully allow customers to leave, grow better (and leave an open door for customers to come back to them in the future).
Here’s a secret — I wanted to launch the first version of The Customer Code at INBOUND 2017. I was excited about the idea, and wanted to start talking about it.
But our leadership team pushed back on me. They said there was no way we could ask other companies to step up and embrace their customer-first ideals when we still had so far to go ourselves. Of particular concern was the communication around our pricing and how customers got billed.
We had to be the change.
The way our pricing works varies quite a bit throughout our product lines, for customers at the Starter level, it tends to be extremely simple, but as our customers’ businesses gets more sophisticated, pricing tends to get more sophisticated as well. And feedback made it clear that, when it came to pricing, our most unhappy customer segment were customers at the Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise levels — so that’s where we dug in.
Like many SaaS companies, we lock-in pricing for customers during their billing period so what they’re paying won’t increase even if their number of contacts does increase. It’s a way to show value before we extract value. But of course:
Customers often wouldn’t remember pricing was locked in for the billing period (they’re busy)
During the year, usage would increase
(If you want to get into the weeds, you can read our Terms of Service here, but that’s the high-level gist.)
So year two renewal would roll around, and a lot can change in a year — a customer’s business may have grown, people forget about the details of a contract they signed 12 months ago, or perhaps the person who originally signed the contract is no longer with the company and a new person is now managing the account — and suddenly customers were getting a bill that was noticeably higher than the prior billing period with little context on why. Yes, many were very (and rightfully!) unhappy about this.
The change needed on our end was actually quite simple–we simply changed the communication approach in our renewal process. First, we adjusted the timing of our communication about the new bill and made a change to our Terms of Service which reduced the number of days notice we needed to honor a non-renewal request – dropping it from 45 days to 10 days. Second, we now go out of our way to inform customers about growth in their contact database before the notice of non-renewal window closes. These changes give our customers far more time to evaluate the product, the value delivered over the past year, and decide if HubSpot still made sense for them. But most importantly, we can feel confident that we’re not surprising customers with an unexpectedly large bill.
And with those simple changes in place…no more upset customers.
Because our customers don’t mind paying, but they do mind feeling played.
The same is true for your customers.
No one should be surprised by an unexpected bill.
No one should need a math degree to figure out what they’ll pay you.
No one should need to jump through hoops to figure out what it might cost to do business with you.
If we had gone live with The Customer Code in 2017, I would have given HubSpot a 5 on Tenet #8: I don’t mind paying, but I do mind being played. Today, I give us a 6. We’ve been doing some things right for awhile – our pricing is transparent and available on our website – and we’ve made substantial improvements on improving communication around renewals, but we’re not done yet.
We recently asked our customer-facing teams how we’re doing when it comes to pricing transparency. Our support and success teams care deeply about the customer, but also understand the needs of the business, and we wanted to know how they think we’re doing when it comes to pricing.
The vast majority of our customer-facing team members feel that our pricing, discounting, and cancellation process are all fair. But when we asked them what one thing they would change for our customers today if they had a magic wand the #1 request was simplifying pricing, packaging, and renewals.
Fair isn’t enough to create a great customer experience.
Transparent doesn’t always equate to simple.
We’re being honest, transparent, and fair; but our customers don’t always feel that way.
We can do better, and we’re going to. We have two plays kicking off that pair VP-level executives with our Voice of the Customer team to improve the billing and contract experience.
Confusing pricing is a negative force on the flywheel of every business. Sixty-nine percent of people said that confusing pricing keeps them from making a purchase.
After seeing this data at INBOUND one HubSpot customers, WashCard, went back to work and decided it was time to give transparent pricing a try. While the industry standard is to require a conversation with a salesperson before giving pricing, WashCard saw this as creating friction in their flywheel so they pulled back the curtain–boldly displaying pricing on their website for all to see.
Amy Olson, the Director of Marketing at WashCard said, “A month into this, we’re getting more leads out of our pricing page than any other page on the website, they make up two thirds of our online conversions. Our sales staff can see that a prospect has looked at the pricing page, and it totally changes the conversation when contacting new potential customers. Game. Changer.”
Customers don’t mind paying, but they do mind being played, they mind unexpectedly big bills, and they mind jumping through hoops to figure out how to budget for your product or services.
If you want to grow, you have to charge for your services. But companies that are open and honest about their pricing, while making it simple to understand – grow better.
