If you have special events coming up, regular promotions or classes, anything you want your customers to know about, then an events calendar is vital to your website's effectiveness.

An events calendar can also encourage people to keep looking at your site. If they want to know about events or promotions then they will look to see what's available. And you can use this chance to tell them about new products etc. You could even use a calendar as the focal point of a community site, to keep people coming back to connect with their friends or colleagues.

At Enspyre we even use a shared calendar (restricted access) so that everyone can see what everyone else is scheduled to be doing. It's great for keeping track of available times for meetings, monitoring salespeople, and even scheduling use of meeting rooms etc. Everyone has a diary, and putting it online makes it more powerful.
 

A gallery of photographs is a great way to introduce yourself or your products. There are several ways to do this, but my current favourite is shown below.

Note - to add photographs to a gallery is as easy as uploading to flickr or facebook. To add a gallery to any page, anywhere on your website, takes less than one minute after I have installed the software and shown you how to do it.

Putting a "contact us" form on your site is a great way to encourage people to get in touch, but you can do a lot more than that.

You can collect all sorts of information, ask people's opinions, invite them to sign up for newsletters, and more.

I'll help you to design contact forms that will gather the information that is important to you, so that you're in a stronger position to sell something to your contacts - and by putting all that information into your database, we can make it easier for you to measure how well your sales effort is working.

Why not register at my site, if you haven't done so already? Sign up for a newsletter or two, fill out the survey form too if you have time. After registering you will also be able to leave comments on selected areas of my site, which is a  good way for me to get feedback from my customers.

I love the slideshow feature! It's a nice piece of eye-candy, and the best thing is that I can change the size and shape of the display, as well as the speed at which the images change. I can make the slideshows appear on the pages I choose, or in different positions on different pages.

Note - to add photographs to a slideshow is as easy as uploading to flickr or facebook. To create a new slideshow, anywhere on your website, takes less than one minute after I have installed the software and shown you how to do it.

Nobody likes spam, but customers do appreciate occasionally being reminded about what you can do for them. And you can also offer free information, advice, special offers, etc that your customers may be really pleased to hear about. They may even tell their friends.

Offering a newsletter is a great way to build your relationship with your customer, but it's important to follow "best practises". I can advise on this, and will help you set up systems that make it easy for you to keep in touch with all your clients: past, present and future! 

RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication" and enables you to automatically include the latest news from another site on your own.

If you sell electronic components then why not add an RSS feed from a news website devoted to your industry? Visitors to your site will be able to get the latest news without going elsewhere. Sports scores? Stock market prices?

How about weather forecasts? Earthquake reports? Public holidays? Any information that may be useful to your customers can be easily collected and made available on your site.