A website is a very powerful marketing tool for your business online. It is your storefront to the world and often acts as the first point of contact with prospective customers. If done right, it can build your business a strong brand and bring lots of customers and sales. Thus, you want to be sure your site gives the right and best impression of your business.
You want it to give as much necessary business information to the visitors as possible with the ultimate goal of converting them into customers.
When it comes to content creation for a new site, every business is unique in it’s own way and thus different sites may have different features and pages. However, there are some pages and content that cut across all businesses and industries. Outlined below are 10 essential web pages that every website should have:-
This is basically the cover of a website. It is the first page that gets presented to visitors when they access the domain name/address of a website. For instance, when you visit www.thecodepot.com the first page that you see is the home page of our website. This page should give visitors an immediate sense of who you are as an organization/business or what your website is all about. It should be well linked to the other pages to guide the visitors to other important information on the website.
People do business with people. Your website visitors would want to know who you are before engaging with your business. This page presents you with the opportunity to talk about yourself. It should tell the web visitors who you are, who your team is, how and where your business started, what is your mission, what is your vision, your core values, and your business’s goals. Tell people what makes you stand out, what makes you special and unique, and why they should choose you instead of your competitors.
What products or services do your business offer? On this page, you define the reason for your business’s existence. Explain what services and/or products you sell in detail and in a way optimized to encourage the visitor to go ahead and take action. If you sell multiple products or services, don’t compress all the information onto one page. Instead, have a dedicated page for every product or service and give more detailed information about it.
The product/service pages are very crucial and can bring you good sales if properly done. These pages should be optimized for SEO to rank high on search engine results when your potential customers search for keywords related to your products and services.
Seeing is believing. When trying to persuade prospects to become customers, showing them what you have already done speaks volumes than just telling them what you can do for them. Like in our case, most of our prospective customers usually ask for a list of websites we have worked on previously before committing. A portfolio page presents you with an opportunity to showcase your previous works. On this page add images, descriptions, and links to the works you have already done in the past. These act as a proof of what you say and shows your capability and hence likely to convert a good number of web visitors into being your customers.
Your “Contact Us” page shows your website visitors all the ways they can get in touch with you. It should list your contact details such as a physical address, phone number, email address, postal address, fax number, links to your social media accounts, and even your business hours.
It should as well have a contact form in which people can fill in their details and submit to send their inquiries to you. Avoid collecting unnecessary details or too much personal information. Just make it as simple as possible.
Adding a google map would also really help much in giving direction to your physical location.
Most of your potential customers are likely to have common questions regarding your business. If each of them is to call you or visit your business premises each time they have such questions, this can be tedious and time-consuming to you and them. An FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page provides a platform where you can answer all of the previously asked questions and those which are likely to be asked in the future. On this page, answer each question explicitly to be viewed collectively by many customers simultaneously. This will save you a great deal of time which you can then use in doing other more important tasks.
A blog is not a page per se, but a collection of all blog posts. A blog is an information-based website or a section of a website that revolves around a specific topic comprising of entries known as posts arranged in chronological order with the most recent entry appearing at the top of the blog’s home page. Most modern websites have a blog which they use for several reasons, including educating their audience and driving organic visitors to the site from search engines like Google.
This page, Reasons why your website should have a blog explains why a website is a must have for your website.
If you will be collecting any kind of information from your website visitors such as through contact form, signup form, etc, this page is really necessary. The page tells your website visitors what kind of information you collect from them, how you store that information, how you use the information, and who has the access to that information.
This is considered the most boring page on any website and one that is rarely visited or even it’s content read. In a nutshell, it is a page that spells out the rules that your web visitors must agree to abide by in order to use your website. Most websites have it. While there’s actually no legal requirement for providing this information, most attorneys will still advise you to have one. It can limit your liability should a customer take you to court, as well as protect your rights to the content contained in your website.
A 404 error page, also known as “Page not found” is a page your visitors get directed to when they try to access a page that doesn’t exist on your website. This can be caused by a typing error of the page URL by a visitor, or when a visitor tries to access a page that has been removed or whose URL changed. This page is useful as it overrides the poor generic one(dead end) generated by the server and allows your visitors to navigate to your other pages.
There you have it. A list of all the essential web pages that every website should have. Creating the content for all these pages may seem overwhelming and hectic. We recommend that you taking it one page at a time. If you are interested in professional and world-class web design and development services, get in touch with us at affordable and customer-friendly rates. It is my hope you have found this post useful to you.
The Code Pot Technologies
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