Now a lot of people might want to jump straight into throwing content onto their website, but organizing yourself first will make the actual creation process go smoother and faster.
What pages your website needs depends a lot on what experience you wish to create for your website visitors. Different visitor needs and goals require different pages.
Create a list of what pages your website MUST HAVE, then rank them in importance. Next, create a list of what pages your website COULD HAVE, then rank them in importance. Now consolidate your lists based upon their rankings and create a hierarchy of how your pages should appear in your navigation system.
Remember that less is more and you want your visitors to be able to easily and quickly find the information they want from your website.
It’s always a good practice to use internal hyperlinks within and between your websites pages … you never know how a visitor might have arrived at your site and it’s helpful to point them in the right direction at all times. Search engines also take internal hyperlinks into account in their ranking algorithims.
For good SEO (search engine optimization) there are 5 specific pages your website should always have.
Home Page:
This page should be located in your main navigation menu.
This is your standard landing page for a website. If you use a blog as your website, it’s best to set your posts to show on your Home Page since this makes your website look “fresh & updated” frequently to search engines.
About Page:
This page should be located in your main navigation menu.
Having a good About Page allows your website visitors to guickly discover what your website is about and what they can expect from exploring it. It gives a sense of history and starts to build a relationship of trust because you’ve taken the care to introduce yourself and describe what you hope to accomplish by being online. This page is the perfect spot to have links to your social profiles and websites since they help to showcase personal details of you and your company.
Contact Page:
This page should be located in your main navigation menu.
Can you imagine someone handing you a business card with only their name and company name on it? You should ALWAYS have a Contact Page with multiple ways of contacting you listed on it. You should include a link to the About Page with a simple statement “To find out more, visit our Social Networks on our About Page”.This page is also a good place to insert a map to your locations and any special hours of operation you might have.
Customer Service Page:
This page should be located in your footer area instead of the main navigation menu.
This is simply a statement of your customer service policies. Search engines like to see these within websites. Take a look at ours to see what you might include in yours.
Privacy Policy Page:
This page should be located in your footer area instead of the main navigation menu.
This is simply a statement of your privacy policy. Search engines like to see these within websites and it helps to establish trust with your website visitors. Take a look at ours to see what you might include in yours.
It also makes good business sense to include these 5 other pages.
Disclaimers Page:
This page is a necissity if you sell or promote products and services on your website.
FAQs Page:
This page lists your most frequently asked questions so you’re not having to continually answer them. It’s a great resource to promote with current customers too. This is a good place to use a hyperlink to your Services Page.
Resources Page:
This page lists valuable resources to assist your visitors and it should definitely include some free downloads that relate to your products and services.
Services Page:
This page details what services you provide. This is also a perfect spot to hyperlink to your FAQs page if you receive a lot of questions in regards to your services.
Terms of Use (a.k.a. Terms Of Service):
This page simply states policies including: copyright, guidelines, liabilities, refunds, rights, spam, warranty, etc. Take a look at ours to see what you might include in yours.
Finally, you want to consider your sub-pages.
I usually create a “Resources” page in all my designs since I know that one of my sub-pages will always be “Downloads”.
If you take a look at my MyCoffeePro website, you’ll notice that I’ve used sub-pages to great effect for the “Coffee Class” and the “Recipes” pages.
Keeping your site organized will not only make it easier for your visitors, but it’ll make it better when search engines crawl and index your site too.
Next up, you have to choose your WordPress Blog Design: Categories.
Here’s your map to all the posts in this series.
