Tips and Tricks on How to Create the 8 Must-have Pages on your Website
When starting a business in 2021, one of the top priorities to start with the right foot is creating a website. It will bring you exposure to a gigantic audience and it can be a make or break for your business in terms of acquiring new customers.
Especially if you have an online business, your website is going to be the front face to the world, it will give your possible future customers a first impression. We all know the importance of first impressions, so if you have a website that is a mess, the probability of your visitors transporting that opinion to your actual business philosophy is very high, and no one wants that!
When meeting someone in person or researching a brand or business for the first time, it will only take us approximately 7 seconds until we formulate our opinion on that person, brand, or business (Forbes), so it is in your best interest for your website to be amazing so it can win the trust of your visitors.
You need to be ready to wow anyone that dares to research your business or is looking for similar products or services to the ones that you provide.
This is why we decided to write this blog post, so we can share with you some tips and tricks that will make your website stand out from the competition just by the way that it is structured.
A website needs to be in tune with the way you run your business, it needs to follow the same structure, the same ideology, the same sense of design, and make the best impression possible every time someone new visits your website.
So in this post, we are going to get deep into what pages are a must-have on your website to help your business ramp up and we will go through the dos and don’ts on each page so you can make the most out of each one of them.
Tips and Tricks on How to Create the 8 Must-have Pages on your Website
Before we start to dissect all the pages on this list let me just give you some general notes in terms of what you should keep in mind while developing your website pages.
First of all, you need to know your target audience. When you are preparing a speech to give at your local university, to be successful you need to write your speech aligned with the type of audience that you have. You don’t what to be the one that made everyone fall asleep in the auditorium.
When it comes to websites, the mindset doesn’t change that much. You need to say what your ideal clients would like to read, you need to show them that you are the right choice and you need to do it almost instantly.
But before you start dumping ALL the information about your business (even your birthday?? Really??), please ask yourself some of the following questions:
What do my ideal clients want from my business?
Why am I better than my competition?
What advantages do my clients have in making business with me?
What factors might my clients consider before making a purchase?
Why would this new visitor be interested in my product or service?
Now after you get the answers to some of those questions you will be in a much better position to come up with the perfect strategy to make that page on your website attract more clients than ever. Be precise, be direct, and be explicit. You don’t want to leave space for questions or doubts. You want your clients to understand exactly the message that you want to transmit and, very important as well, what is the next step. That can be the next step to make a purchase, or a free download to add them to your mailing list or redirect them to your contact form. And that brings me to my next point, Call-to-Actions.
Call-to-Action, or CTA for short, is everything that guides your website visitors to the next step inside your website. It can be a button, an image, a headline with a hyperlink, among others. The type of CTA doesn’t matter that much, what matters is their function and if the CTA is working as expected.
CTAs on a website page need to be well balanced. They need to be constantly present in your visitors' eye site but you don’t want the CTAs to be too much on your face.
You need to be creative when displaying them on the website so the CTAs can fall in place with the website design but at the same time attractive enough for people to be willing to click on them.
And my last recommendation is to know the exact message that you want to transmit with the page that you are creating. You need to have it crystal clear! Otherwise, the page will not succeed in the way that you envisioned.
So these are our 3 general points to consider when creating a page for your website. You need to know your target audience, your CTA placement, and the message.
Now let’s get into some details about each page.
Keep in mind that the majority of the pages are must-haves on every website while a few of them are specific for different types of business.
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Homepage
We don’t need to tell you that your website needs a Homepage. Every website has one. But what we can do is tell you the most important factors to which you should pay attention.
The Homepage is the first impression of the first impression, which means that this is the first thing that your visitors are going to see once they enter your website.
With that being said, you need to make it the most appealing and have the right elements in the right spots.
When a new customer enters your website, he/she needs to know instantly:
The name of the business
Your area of business
What products/services do you provide. At least which type.
How to proceed through your website flow
So considering that information your website’s first screen should have:
Your company’s logo or name
A navigation menu
A catchy headline that hints at your area of business. To enhance this part you can use an image that is illustrative of your services or products.
A CTA that guides your visitors to the next step
After that first screen, you can look at your homepage as a summary of everything that is going on on your website. From more information about your business to your portfolio, to the highlight of your services/products, you can be creative and make your homepage the most informative and appealing possible.
Try to provide the maximum amount of information that you can about you and your business but I cannot stress this enough, DON’T OVERDO IT!
No one likes to go to a website that doesn’t provide enough information about a certain business but also no one likes to be overwhelmed with too much either. Try to keep all the information that you want to provide clean, easy to read, and as short as possible. Remember that you have other pages on your website where you can get into more depth about more extensive topics.
Another point that you should take into consideration is the CTAs. Be precise with them, so you can retain your visitors. Try to make them feel like they are there to help your visitors and not to force them to do something.
So to summarize everything, make sure that you have all the information and CTAs necessary on your homepage, be creative, and don’t overdo it. If you follow these tips you are one step closer to creating an amazing homepage for your website.
About
There are a couple of different things that you can do with this page, you can either focus on informing your visitors about the company or you can focus it on the team. Both of them are great but, in our opinion, focusing your About page in your company works better for recognizable brands and product-oriented businesses will focus on the team with better suited for companies that are based in providing services.
When you are selling a product you want it to be recognizable through the companies logo or through the product itself while when you provide services you want people to trust you and the people that work with you.
This is why we point out these 2 different types of About page, so you can take advantage of the one that best suits your type of business.
About the structure of the page, you can give wings to your imagination, there is no magic trick to make an About page more or less appealing, you need to put your mind into it and make it the most interesting for your visitors.
Throw a CTA here in there, to help your About page retain visitors as well. Keep it clean and simple but don’t forget about them.
Services
The services page only makes sense to be on your website if your business provides services, of course.
On this page, you should inform your visitor of relevant details like what is included with the service, the way you work (timeframe, process,...), the price, and try to emphasize the benefits that your clients get with that type of service.
This is the page where we recommend being more aggressive with the use of CTAs, and it is easy to understand why. This is most likely the last page that your visitors have seen before contacting you or making the purchase, so let’s make it easy on them and have CTAs in the right places.
The services page is also great to display testimonials and reviews, this way people interested in what you offer will see the satisfaction of previous clients and be one step closer to hiring you.
Shop
If the center of your business model is selling products online then you will not make it further without an online shop page.
This is where you will display all your products but there is a bit more to it than throwing them into the page without considering some details.
You should think about the best method to organize your products. You can use categories or tags to group your products and make it easier for the customers to filter and quickly find the products that they are looking for.
Make sure that the products are the center of attention on the page. Don’t add unnecessary information, that can shift the focus of customers and make you lose sales. Limit yourself to 1 or 2 headlines, photos of the products, their prices, and names.
A common mistake that I often see in shop pages is the lack of an “Add to Cart” button next to each product. We always recommend our clients to have these buttons on their shop page because if your customers have to enter the product page to add them to the cart is one more click that they need to do and we want to make the sale process simple.
Portfolio
The Portfolio page is a must for anyone that needs to show the type of work that they provide. It is very common to see this type of page on artists' and designers' websites. We also have one here.
This is a very unique page for each type of business but there are some guidelines that you can follow to be sure you make the most out of a portfolio page.
Display your past projects with a summary focused on the final product. Don’t lose yourself in explaining every detail, for that you can create individual pages for each project and give all the information that you see fit about it. You can see an example of this on our portfolio page.
Display your testimonials and reviews. Future customers will be more than pleased to read good things about you and your company from other people.
Focus your portfolio on your ideal client. You might have a lot of work to present on the portfolio page but you need to use the ones that will appeal to your ideal client. Is better to have 4 projects that are targeted to your potential customers that have 20 projects that are all over the place.
Blog
A blog is one of the most effective ways to generate traffic to your website organically. We know that there are a lot of people that might not have the time or patience to create a blog but we always recommend it. If you are consistent and create quality content for your target audience, later one you will collect the dividends.
The blog page is the main directory to all of your blog posts and you should make it enjoyable to explore and easy to navigate. To achieve that you can organize your blog posts by category and use tags to group them, this way your website visitors will be able to filter the blog post within the same theme that they are looking for.
In terms of the page presentation, you can be creative with the placement and how the blog posts are presented but some elements are a must like an image, the blog post title, and a “Read More” CTA. You can also enhance it with a small excerpt to give your readers a small preview of what to expect from the post.
Make it clean, make it easy to navigate, and make it interesting and this page will be a powerful tool in your website.
Contact page
Every website should have a method to contact the owner and nothing better than having a contact page to do that.
On this page, you will insert business phone numbers, e-mails, addresses, social media accounts, and any other relevant information that you would like your website visitors to have access to.
This is also the page where is very common to see contact forms and we recommend it. These forms can also bring a lot of benefits to your interaction with your customers because you can require information that will make your process easier. For example, if you run a taxi company you might want to know from the get-go how many passengers you are going to be transporting as well as the pick-up and the drop-off points.
There is not much else to this page rather than giving your customers the best ways to contact you.
Privacy Policy
This might be the most boring page of the website but because of its importance, it cannot be neglected.
A Privacy Policy page is where you make a statement on how your company handles your customers' and website visitors' data.
You don’t need to spend that much time being creative, this is just a legal procedure that will make your business look more professional.
The content on this page might vary from business to business but you can always use a general template to start off and then update it along the way.
Final Thoughts
These are our tips and tricks for you to bring out the most benefits of the must-have pages on a website. All of the information that we shared with you has been successful for us and our clients so if you implement them we are sure that you will be successful too.
Creating your own business takes time and effort and the same goes for your website, if you put hard work into it, you will have a relentless tool in the search of new customers and it will bring you sales nonstop.
Make sure you apply our suggestion to your website and you will be many steps ahead of the majority of your competitors.