Choice Of Pages

The number and type of pages is completely up to you. You can have everything on one page (which is surprisingly quite common because all it asks the visitor to do is to scroll down and read the page) or have it split over a logical number of pages. Here’s what I suggest and what pages you should include.

1. Home Page

This is the most important page. It is the first page readers will see when they type in your domain name. It is this page which will determine whether they will visit any of your other pages. It’s your chance (and only chance) to make an impression. You will not get a second chance to do this.

If they like your home page they will stay and find out what you’ve got to offer by reading further. But if for whatever reason they dislike your home page they’ll be heading for that address bar ready to type in a new address, clicking the back button, clicking on their default home page or clicking on an ad on your site. They will do whatever it takes to get off your site.

You do not want this to happen. So you have to make sure you get your home page right. I will show you how to do this further down the line, but I want you to remember the significance of this page relative to your whole website. This page is damned important and is crucial to your success.

You can stop here and make your home page the website. This would work well if you were selling one product and you wanted to spoon feed your sales speech to them with the minimum of interactivity from your potential customer. Lots of eBooks are sold like this. The home page uses clever sales talk so that they press the right buttons in your mind, you eventually press the ‘buy now’ button and give them your credit card details. Some call it NLP, others call it mind control! Whatever they call it - it works. If you are selling one product then you should consider this strategy.

2. Contact Page

A website without a contacts page is just a website. A website with a contacts page is a credible business. It’s a website by someone who is willing to put their name, address, telephone, fax and email and sometimes portrait photo to it! I would strongly recommend you put a contacts page on your website with all your contact details on it.

I regularly go from the home page straight to the contacts page to see where they’re based, to check if it’s an office address, to see if there are any photos of the staff, if they’ve got a press/PR department or to simply see if they’ve got a landline and fax number. If there is no contacts page I may click away because I believe that if they do not want to be contacted then their customer service must be lousy.

If you are reluctant to put your actual details, but want readers to be able to contact you, then consider adding a contact form. This is where you create a form of a specified number of form fields and then get the reader to add the data within the fields. This way the communication can be one way and you can respond only if the message is worth replying to. This is better than having no contact details at all.

3. About Us Page

An about us page is just that. It’s a page giving a little history of the website or business or how the whole idea of the site came about. These pages are just nice. They are like the icing on the cake. It gives you a sense of completeness about the site, however this page is not essential. It just shows that you care about the visitor enough to give them a background resumé about yourself and your site.

You can include in your about us page things such as these:

• Why you set the site up.
• When you started trading.
• A brief business history.
• CV type information about you and the key staff members.
• What your plans are for the business and site.
• Your mission statement and plans for the business site.
• Key achievements of the business so far.

 

If you’re just starting out some of the things mentioned above may not be applicable, but use the about us page to tell a story about you. Everyone loves a story…