So you are interested in owning a website or you already have one but you are not sure if your website has the essential pages? Well, I think I need to make something clear here before we continue. A lot of people don’t know the difference between a Post and a Page. Both look alike, have the same features but are used for different purposes.

The best way to understand both is to see a post as a subset of a page. Remember set theory in your mathematics class in high school, right? That’s what we are talking about. A website is made up of pages and posts and a page can contain links to many posts. A post, usually dedicated to blogging, is where you put up your blog posts and they are arranged in reverse chronological order such that the latest post appears before preceding ones. This means that posts are dynamic.

On the other hand, pages are static “one-off” type content that makes for a website. If a website is a likened to a book, pages are the pages that make up the book and posts are the preliminary pages of the book (this depends on the purpose of the website).

Now back to our essential pages discussion. There is no hard-and-fast rule for this. The pages of a website depend on the purpose of the website. However, on a general note, a business website should have some of or all of these pages.

Home page:

This is the default page of your website. The very page you see when you get into a website like Benchmark Digital, Coca-Cola etc. Every website has a home page and for blogging sites, the home page is the Blog page.

Because this is the first page a visitor who comes in through a custom URL will see, first impression principle will play out. Your homepage should have the best design of all your pages and should have a good user interface with all the buttons and links working properly. This is because a first-time visitor can grade your whole website and indeed, your business from just your home page alone. Do you now get how important it is to have a good home page?

In addition to this, your home page should be a road map to the rest of your website. Every section of your website should have at least a link on your homepage. This is more like the homepage summarizes the whole website. You see, a great deal of work is needed at this point to have an irresistible website.

“About Us” Page

As a corporate entity or a business owner, your “About Us” page just as the title implies, ought to address the public on what your business is all about. Sometimes, it contains services you render but if you’ve got a lot of services that you are offering, a separate page should be dedicated to talking about them.

On a more professional base, your “About Us” page should talk about your company statements: Vision, Mission, Tagline, Drive, Growth Process, Awards, Accolades, year of incorporation, Unique Selling Point and similar information you feel the public should know.

Services Page

When you’ve got so many services to talk about, there is a need to separate it into different pages. This page should detail all the services your business offers and how it is better than those of your competitors. Because the “Services” page may be where your visitors may be interested in, a means of contact should be available on the page. This contact can be a contact form, phone number, social media links or email. But if you have all this in your footer or heading, then you may not need to add all of them on the page.

If your services can be paid for instantly without contacting you, then a link to payment page should be included. This is because internet users are very fragile and dynamic. Grab them as soon as you can because in a bid to search for where to make a payment, something can happen and they leave your website. That may be the end of their visit.

Contact page:

This is very important. How do your visitors reach you if they want to? A contact page should answer that question in a very simple way. It should contain a callback or request form where they can state explicitly what they are contacting you for. This form should be as simple as possible as internet users have a very short interest span.

This page should also contain very vital information like phone numbers, email address, physical address, social media links and other means of reaching you.

Blog:

This is not just for bloggers alone but any business interested in informing the public and keeping them engaged with contents related to what they do. A blog page should be a collection of all the blog posts arranged in descending order from the most recent.

Apart from the fact that it keeps the public aware, blog pages are usually the most visited pages of the website because your content draws organic searches from across the globe and many of them will be interacting first with your website through the blogs.

Pricing:

You’ve got a range of products that you are selling and you need it to be accessible at once whenever a visitor comes to your site, then you need this page. A Pricing page lists all your products or services and the different category to which they belong listing all the features of each category.

FAQ:

Short for Frequently Asked Questions. This is a page that lists all the possible questions visitors may be asking and their answers. With this, you have gone ahead of your visitors in replying to their heart questions and it reduces the number of requests and contacts you may be receiving from visitors. These questions are usually a collection of questions you have been asked over the period of running your business and it is used for websites that render lots of services to the public. To learn more about this, read up essential tools for a website.

Like I said earlier, there is no hard-and-fast rule for this. The pages used on a website should be based on the purpose of the website. However, these pages should be visible from every page and post of the website by arranging them on the navigation bar in the header and the footer.

So you may need to modify your website to reflect what your visitors may want and at Benchmark Digital, we can help you with that and even more.