Useful? Pin it to your web design board on Pinterest.When hiring a web designer one of the things you’ll discuss is what pages you need for your new website. At the very least you’ll be needing a Home page, About Us, FAQs, Contact Us, Services and Privacy and Terms of Conditions.
Quite often, you’ll need more pages. So even if you’re looking for a “simple” website, you will need to plan the pages and the content for those pages.
Home Pages
Your Home Page is where you make your first impression. A good home page has a strong visual, a great headline that speaks to your ideal client and a tagline that inspires them to read further down the page.
You’d also add your social proof – your media appearances and your testimonials. You’ll mention your primary service, and link to it.
Your navigation will be at the top of the page, or underneath the strong visual aka hero image. It’s here the visitor will be engaged to move further around your website. The Navigation tends to house all the pages that we mentioned earlier:
- Home page,
- About Us,
- FAQs,
- Contact Us,
- Services
- Privacy and Terms of Conditions
It may also house a link to your blog or podcast depending on how you plan to market your website.
About Us
The about us page is where you talk about yourself but from your ideal client’s perspective. It’s not a CV and it’s not a link to your LinkedIn profile. A good about us page will contain a good quality photograph of you, a video sharing why you love working with your dream clients, the results you get for them and what the next step is.
In this, About Us page from Leads / Launch / Leverage you can see a timeline animated going down the page. In this About US page from Sally Baker, you can see the page is almost a letter speaking to the needs of her dream clients and it opens with reassurance. On the About Page of SVA, you can find out how the organisation was formed and who benefits from the services.
A good about us page takes time to research and gather all the elements in place, and the one common element all good about us pages have is the ability for dream clients to identify themselves.
FAQs
Frequently asked questions pages are brilliant for potential clients to read, show up well in the search engines and reassure prospective customers. At Inspire for Life Coaching, Angie shares her FAQs in a toggled accordion so the reader can see what the questions are, and click to read the answers. If you’re having a FAQS page you’ll need to think about the questions that you’re asked about your business and include them here.
Contact Us
The Contact Us page is where you can add a map, directions, social media follow buttons, your phone number and any other way you want your clients to get in touch with you.
Susan Marot from Succeed At Selling has a drop-down menu in her contact form so that her visitors can choose why they’re contacting her. You’ll also notice her contact page is called “engage” in her navigation to encourage visitors to click.
Services
Services can be displayed in a number of ways. They can be individual pages linked to the main service page like Simona Frumen has here. Or, they can be a dropdown like web designer Leah Matthews has on her site here. Coach Naomi Martell-Bundock has both a services page and a dropdown on her site. On her services page Naomi includes social proof, who benefits from that service and encourages you to contact her.
Privacy & Terms and Conditions.
Ideally, these are two separate pages on your website. These are also 2 of the 4 the mandatory pages that your website absolutely must have. Yes, all the above pages are optional! Your website must have
- Privacy Policy
- Cookie Policy
- Terms and Conditions
- Copyright
Often, you’ll find these 4 pages condensed into two; Privacy and Terms and Conditions. These pages are generally housed in the footer of your website and are displayed on every single page of your website.
These are also the pages of your website that neither you or your web designer will write. You’ll come to us for a policy pack containing these, completed them and then paste them into your web pages.
You can see a great example of a privacy page, customised to the business from VIP VA here.
These pages are generally the basic pages that form your website. You may find you want additional pages such as sales pages, landing pages and opt in pages. Having your website built with CMS will certainly make it easier for you to add additional pages as you need them.
That’s a lot of pages to write. We can help you out with your legal policies as well as your web designer hiring agreement.
