What pages are absolutely required on every website?
You’re ready to get a new website — or rebuild your old one. You’ve chosen what you want the look and feel to be. You’ve chosen someone to work with. But what are the pages that are absolutely vital to have on your site when you are working on your web design with someone in Darwin or elsewhere?
There’s five kinds of pages that are absolutely essential on almost every website and a couple of extras that are every handy to have if you want to be compliant or wish to get as much official information out there about your business.
The absolute basics
First and foremost, the Home page is where everything starts. But rather than seeing the home page as a place where every piece of information is, limit it to being the place where the link to all the information is. It’s vital that your home page contains your basic contact information like address, phone number and email address, but it’s also important that the words and phrases that you want your business to be found for be there as well. Any additional general information about your business can move off to the About page. This is often the page visited by those who are doing research on you, looking for your background or even your history. This page doesn’t have to be exhaustive. But it does have to be informative if it’s to be included at all. Your Contact page is then the equivalent, but it contains every point of contact that the public can have with your business. While some of this information is contained on the front, and often, every page, this page may contain additional extras like Facebook pages, Twitter links, additional departmental phone numbers, and importantly, a way for people to contact your accounts people. This is often overlooked, but important for an easy path to paying you or getting paid by you.
What you do
The Products or Services page may be one page or a consolidated page of all your products and services that links to multiple pages with more detail about each individual product or service. These pages don’t have to be full of details. In fact, if each product or service has its own individual page, then this consolidated page only really needs to have the name of the product or service an accompanying single photo of it and a brief summary to lead someone to want to click a button to go to the dedicated page for it.
Compliance
And these days with privacy and regulation featuring heavily online, you should provide a comprehensive Privacy Policy page if you collect information about people, including cookies, form information or contact information. Your Privacy Policy then needs to be backed up with a Terms of Use page which outlines who and what you website is for and legally describes how people are to use and not use your website. Compliance may also stretch to a Returns Policy when it comes to e-commerce. If you are selling items to people in any developed nation, you need a returns policy to be compliant with many shopping aggregators like Amazon, eBay, Wish and others. And while you’re on the topic of website compliance, a Disclaimer page is useful for explaining what you do and don’t hold liability for when it comes to your products and services. This can be a handy page to outline that you have compliance insurances like Cyber Security Insurance, Public Liability Insurance and Professional Indemnity Insurance.
While the types of pages you can have on a website can be endless, there are certain pages that every website should have as a base standard. Does your website comply?
This article was originally posted at Clickstarter.
Dante St James is a Community Trainer for Facebook Australia & New Zealand, a digital marketer who founded Clickstarter, and Head of Digital Solutions at Treeti Business Consulting, Australia.
