Hello, my name is Elise and I’m a web strategist here at TinyFrog Technologies and I want to talk about some additional tools and features that you can add to your website to improve the user experience.
Your website provides you with a really, really valuable opportunity to share resources and start to connect and engage with potential new clients and customers. Now, we don’t want to overcrowd the website with too many flashy tools or the latest features but there’s a few items that can help improve the experience that visitors have and make it easier for you and your team as they transition and become a client.
Whether you offer services or sell a product, one of those tools is a chat feature. So, maybe you can set up an AI chat bot that is designed to answer the most common questions that people have in relation to your company or your offerings. Another way is to actually use a live chat where somebody on your team is available in real time to answer somebody’s questions and talk through any concerns or ideas that they may have. This is our personal preference since it is real time and it is with somebody who’s on your team. It starts to build that connection really early on and it’s also a really valuable tool for existing clients who may want to reach out with a quick favor or a question they may have.
Another feature you can add is a calendar scheduler. This is really good if the goal of your website is to schedule an appointment or book a consultation with prospective clients. The calendar tool is really easy because it shows people your availability and gives them a little bit more control over when they want to schedule the meeting, which also cuts out that never ending back and forth of trying to get in with the same schedule and timing and unnecessary communication.
If you want to bring a more personal touch to your website, videos are a really great tool to do that and there’s a few reasons that we like to incorporate videos. The first one is that it starts to show your personality online and so rather than just having people read content, they’re able to actually see what you look like, see your body language, and see how you speak about your services or your company.
This is also a really good tool if any of your services are a little bit more complicated or detailed because a video allows you to talk through the process in a little bit more of a natural way compared with written content and it also makes it easy for somebody to understand things since you can bring in visual examples or illustrations or graphics to support what you’re speaking about.
We recommend using a few videos throughout the key pages of your website, perhaps your homepage, your services and your about. You definitely don’t want to overcrowd the website with too much video content and you want to use it as a supplementary tool so that in the event someone can’t watch the video they’re still able to understand enough about what you offer by reading the content. Another really important note for videos is to make sure that you have closed captions so that the content is accessible for everybody.
Lastly, you can use your website as a hub for any additional content or resources or connections that your clients may need. If you have a portal, for example, include a link to access the login page from your website so that it’s super easy for people to get back to that as they need it. Maybe you have a lot of third-party connections or referral partners or partners that you’re clients use a lot in association with your services, so create a page on your site to link out and share their contact information or their website as well just to integrate everything really nicely together.
Before you choose to add any of these features to your website, you want to make sure that they not only work for your team but they also make sense and are applicable to your clients. The last thing you want is to have a calendar scheduler with an inaccurate schedule or a link to a portal that actually doesn’t link anywhere. We don’t want to create any extra frustration for our clients by trying to fit in too many tools or resources into your website.
And so another thing to be mindful of is making sure that the tools are in line with your target audience. Maybe you work with people that aren’t as tech savvy and so I would definitely recommend avoiding components that may have a higher learning curve just to keep things as simple as possible for your audience. If you need any help implementing some new tools and features on your website, we’re happy to help you out with that. Thanks!
