|
You can often hear today that a good website is a functional website. And what does development of a functional website include? And that are the main functions of such websites?
As a matter of fact, much depends on the external appearance of a website. Development of a website for business, entertainment, communication or development of an information portal presupposes totally different functions of a website:
- informative function;
- commercial function;
- advertising function;
- image function;
- communicative function;
- marketing function;
- service function.
A great number of sites perform all these functions, others – only part of them. What is the main feature of a website? It is usability and nice web design for the users and maintenance of the company's image and profitability for the owner of the website. Thar is why in the most general case functionality of the website developed can be viewed from two points of view: visitor's and site owner's viewpoints.
What is website functionality for visitors?
Today visitors are practically not interested in websites which they can just view without an opportunity to perform any interactive actions anymore. That is why event the simplest small business sites are gradually equipped by various program modules which permit visitors to communicate with each other (forums, chats) and express their opinion on different questions (polls, votes).
You cannot do without functional elements in large complex projects, for example, Internet portals. News blocks, RSS feeds, weather informers and search are at the disposal of visitors.
And, for instance, an online shop should have wide functional on default. In this case its main functional elements are: shopping cart, online ordering and payment system. Development of an online shop is impossible without these elements.
And, of course, entertaining websites, in their turn, contain a lot of entertaining functions: online radio, video and audio players. Visitors can also work with images – upload them to the site and download from the site, edit images online.
Besides visitors of any website (in particular, any complex and multibranch website) will need search function. Without this function it is very hard for visitors to orientate themselves in numerous sections, subsections and categories.
Therefore a functional site for the visitors is a website which maintains various interactive facilities which permit to realize any demands and wishes.
And what is a functional website for its owner?
Priorities of website owners slightly differ from that of site visitors. It is quite natural. If a website has been developed for certain commercial purposes such as increase of demand for goods and services, sales and purchases online, attraction of clients and partners etc, in the long run the number of site visitors is not so important. It is the number of potential clients that really counts. It means that a site should provide its owner with the means which will help to complete this task. To achieve these goals the site should have administration panel with broad functional.
What facilities should such administration panel provide? For instance, if a visitor has come to the site from the search engine by a certain query, it is evident, that site content should correspond to this search query as precisely as possible. Therefore it is the informative function of the site which comes first. If this function is well-performed, your casual visitors will become your regular visitors. That is why functionality of the administration panel should obligatory include the opportunity of efficient management of site content.
As it has already been mentioned above, it is the number of clients attracted that counts for the site owner. That is why site development should include development of the component responsible for registration of visitors. In the case of an online shop its owner will surely need the function of adding goods into the catalog, managing the prices for the goods, electronic payment system. Development of a functional website should also include the components for work with advertising, for instance, banner rotators, because advertising on the Internet is an excellent means of website promotion.
How to develop a functional website?
Theoretically you can write a server or a client-side script for each function and insert it into each particular page of your site. But such approach is long, tiresome and unreasonable. That is why the best means for development of a functional website is to develop the site on the base of a content management system (CMS). CMS already includes all necessary basic functional for a high-quality website. Thanks to high level of extensibility of most CMS main functions of the site can be easily supplemented with special extensions – plug-ins.
Today it is functionality of websites which is the most important in the sphere of web design. Why does it happen so? The reason is that only functional websites can help their owners to interact with the visitors actively, to manage information efficiently and bring them maximum profit! Where can you order development of a functional website? Professional team of web design studio WebStudio2U can offer you development of a really functional website!
TAGS
fucntional site,
functional site development,
internet portal,
small business site,
online shop,
website development,
web design,
website design |
website development 
