Now that we know the most important thing you need to do when creating your Web site, I'd like to get into the nitty-gritty and talk about some of the things that you really should have on your Web site. Think of these as features that are must-have's.

Your logo

Your logo should be on every page on your site. It shouldn't be too big, because then it dominates everything. You want a gentle reminder, not a club over the head. As an additional bonus, your logo should link back to your home page. A lot of people won't look for that, but some will, and it's a nice feature to include.

The 'Footer'

My partners at Bryan Consulting and I call this chunk of copy that goes at the bottom of every page on the site the 'Footer'. Here's what one looks like from the Public Relations Society of America, St. Louis chapter:

Notice what the Footer contains. On the bottom is the contact information for your organization: snail mail (yes, people still use snail mail) and phone number (yes, people still use the telephone). If you've got a general email address, such as an 'info@', then include that as well. It's important to make it easy for people to find out how to contact your organization, and a link to a 'Contact' page, which also essential, just isn't enough.

Above the contact information, we include a link to the site's privacy policy, which is always important to include, the copyright statement, and a link to what we call 'About This Site'. 'About This Site' allows us a small area to brag on the organization who owns the Web site, and explain Bryan Consulting's part in the process. Overall, the footer is small but very powerful.

Search

Search is incredibly important, because it enables your users to find content on your site that isn't always easily found. However, studies have shown that people often don't use search effectively. In other words, users will, if it's strongly emphasized, immediately use search to try to find things, and then, when search doesn't work because their search terms aren't well chosen, they give up and leave the site. In other words, search should be available as a tool, but it should be de-emphasized so it's not your main navigation tool. On our sites, we provide a link to Search on every page, as at the National Conference for Community & Justice site, but we don't provide a search box.

By the way: all rules were meant to be broken. If your site is small, with only a handful of pages, then don't include search at all. It will just get in the way.

Site map

A site map is an outline of every page on your Web site, conveniently presented on one Web page. Here's an example from Butterfield Youth Services, which runs several homes for troubled kids:

A site map is a powerful tool for users of your site. With it, they can find exactly the content they were looking for, and can be there with just a click. Unfortunately, site maps can be a real pain to maintain manually. Every time you create a new Web page, you've got to head over to the Site Map page and add a link to the new page. It's much easier if you can automate the process, so that new pages are automatically added to the Site Map without any extra work on your part. In just a minute I'm going to be discussing a way to do just that.

By the way, notice in the illustration above for NCCJ that the link to the Site Map goes next to the link for Search. It's available on any page if your users need it, and trust me, many folks will definitely take advantage of it.

Print This Page

We've all been at a big Web site, like the New York Times or the Post-Dispatch, and wanted to print the page we're viewing. Most pages, however, have a lot of pictures and navigation buttons and other stuff on them that we don't need to print. As a courtesy to their users, most big sites provide a link titled something like 'Print This Page' that presents users with a simplified, text-only version of the Web page, suitable for printing. Here's one example from the Beyond Housing Neighborhood Housing Services site here in St. Louis:

Again, you don't want to do this manually; instead, try to automate the process. After all, that's what computers are good for: the boring, tedious stuff that drives humans crazy.

Email This Page

You'll notice above that there is a button next to Print This Page that says, 'Email This Page.' If you've got content that you want people to share, then include a link on every page that will email the content. This requires some backend work for your Web developers, but it can really pay off. Now, your site visitors become site marketers as well, spreading your organization's name and content all over the world.

RSS feeds for news & updates

This one is a bit harder to explain, but it's an important concept that you really should consider for your Web site, as this technology is definitely one that will only grow in importance in the coming years. Let's say that you post some news items on your Web site. Something new and interesting has happened within your organization, and you want people to know about it. Once you post a couple of short news items, your home page may start to look like that of Butterfield Youth Services, or BYS:

Now, if people know that your site posts regular updates, they will presumably come back to your site often to see what has updated. A lot of people will do just that. Unfortunately, a lot of people will not. They're simply too busy and there are too many sites that engage their interest. A new technology called RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, aims to change that.

If your server is set up to support RSS, then every time you post a fresh news item, that item gets added to your Web site's RSS file. Folks subscribe to your RSS file using software called a 'news aggregator' or 'RSS aggregator'. Every hour, the news aggregator checks any RSS feeds to which you have subscribed. If there are any updates to report, the aggregator grabs them and displays them. If there aren't any updates, then the aggregator does nothing for another hour, when it checks once again.

I use a news aggregator named 'Radio' made by UserLand, a company that helped pioneer RSS and news aggregation. My page of collected RSS feeds looks like this:

It's really easy to set up a news aggregator, and more and more Web sites are catering to the people using this new software by setting up RSS feeds. Ideally, your server automates the whole RSS creation process. Trust me: you don't want to have to set up a RSS feed manually. As more and more people 'lose' emails in a sea of spam and email from friends and family, RSS is starting to look more attractive to organizations that want to get the word out in an effective, useful way.