Chances are, you’ll have a few of the pages below in your site’s main menu. We’ve included some content ideas for each of the most commonly used website pages here.
Home
Your homepage is like a contents page for your site. It’s designed to feature all the most important or eye-catching detail that would make a visitor want to delve deeper into the site to find out more or to buy. Your homepage’s layout is often a lot more complex than any of the other pages in your site and may include any or all of the following:
- A sliding banner area – with slides that illustrate the main features of your organisation, any special offers etc. This is designed to be a large, eye-catching area that gets the user clicking before they’ve seen anything else.
- Welcome text – used less often these days, a welcome area will give an overview of what the business does and invite the user to explore. These pieces of text are more necessary when it’s more important to explain what the company does.
- Feature boxes – Icons or images with a short piece of text which highlight the main services or products the company offers.
- Popular Product listing or product categories – If you have a store, you probably want to showcase your products.
- Latest Blog Posts – A selection of posts with a text excerpt that might encourage the user to read further.
- Newsletter sign-up – often employed as a pop-over these days, they’re still no less irritating! Designed to interrupt the user’s browsing and make them sign up for the newsletter. Use with caution. An email list is a powerful marketing tool, but you can annoy your visitors by bombarding them with this sort of thing too quickly. We don’t include or particularly endorse the use of pop-overs on our sites, and encourage a basic newsletter sign up form on the homepage instead.
- Contact Details – a quick way the user can phone or email the company.
About Us
This page gives an overview of the organisation and it’s purpose is to:
- show the customer the provenance or history of the company
- let the customer know the values of the company
- introduce the people who run the company and create a personal connection
- Explain what the company does, and how it does it.
Some often used subpages or sub-sections of this page might be titled as follows:
- Meet the Team
- Our History
- Our Values / Mission / Ethos
- What We Do
Products / Services
Most companies either sell product or services. These pages represent the meat of the content that your site visitors will probably make a bee-line for. This is the place where you can go into detail about your products and services and really sell what it is you do. If you have distinct products or services, you could provide a page for each, or even a section for each comprised of various further subpages if there is a lot of ground to cover.
When presenting your products and services, try to think about what will excite your prospective buyer. Think Apple or Samsung: the way they use beautiful images to create desire. They often try to break up text into small chunks to make them more inviting to read, using large headings, and small snatches of text where required. This is more effective than large volumes of text, but there’s still a place for text if it’s required. Just try and break it up with subheadings, ands sections and images. Bulleted lists are also good to list product or service features.
If there’s a lot of products or services to cover, you could start with a main Products and Services page that displays your offerings in a grid of images with captions. These could then drill down to a main page for each product or service, with an option to buy. You can then also provide further subpages to elaborate on the product or service in more detail. This keeps it simple and attractive for site visitors and those that want to read further information can do so.
Blog
Your blog page will be an automatically generated page listing your blog posts in chronological order. So we’re not talking about creating a blog page so much as the continual creation of posts for your blog. It’s important to blog for SEO purposes as well as to keep your site visitors up to date with your company and to position yourself as an expert in your field. You can write blog posts on your industry or your customers’ experiences of your services, or new offerings you’re bringing to market soon – whatever is relevant to your website and interesting to the target market of your business. If you can designate a blogger to create content for your business on a regular basis, that can be a useful way of ensuring consistent output. It doesn’t look good when your blog has only a couple of posts, or large gaps of time pass between posts.
Contact Page
As you’d probably guess, these pages provide a means for customers to get in touch with your company. You can call it what you like: Get in Touch, Connect With Us, Contact Us, Enquiries. Just provide a simple contact form, phone, email, address and possibly an embedded map of your location. This is usually all that is required of this page.
Other Popular Page Types
You may also need to include some of the pages below depending on the kind of organisation you have:
- Events – use events software to list upcoming events and automatically remove dates that have passed. A calendar can also show a feed of your events or diary for indicating availability.
- Portfolio – use our theme’s Projects section with portfolio or gallery modules to showcase your product examples or projects.
- Support – provide a knowledgebase of articles to help your customers help themselves.
- FAQ – frequently asked questions help allay fears and educate your customers.