5 Pages Every Website Should Have
No matter what kind of website you run, from personal to business…for information or for profit, as part of your website development process, there are 5 basic web pages that should be the first pages that you create for your website. These pages will be the foundation for the rest of your site. Every one of these pages can be as detailed or as simple as you see fit. Obviously, the more you offer your visitors the more detailed you may want to make the page.
Here are the 5 web pages:
About Us – This should be the very first page that you create. It should also be the one you spend the most time on creating and writing. This page lets your visitors know who you(or your company) are and what your site is about. The about us page gives your visitors more reason to trust your site and its contents. Visitors will be able to understand more about what you are trying to accomplish with your site by knowing a bit more about the people behind the site. Also, this is a great way for yourself, as the web owner, to stay on track with your website as it grows.
Contact Us – There should always be a way for your visitors to contact you whether through a contact form on your site our just simply placing an email link on a page. This, again, lets your visitors feel confident that your site isn’t a fly-by-night operation. Even better would be to also include a physical address on your contact us page. This gives your visitors an impression that they are dealing with real people who operate and run your site. The bare minimum should be an email address.
Terms of Use(or equivalent) – This page is basically so there is no misunderstanding of what your site offers your visitors. It is a legal protection to let your visitors know how to best interpret and use your sites content.
Privacy Policy – This page lets visitors know just how much information your site will collect from the them and how that information will be used. It should outline your visitors rights as well as your sites responsibilities. Privacy is a very important issue these days so let your visitors know how important you value their privacy.
Site Map – This page is very useful for your visitors to find a specific page on your site without possibly having to go through a ton of links first. Having a site map of your site will also help search engine spiders crawl every page that is important.
In conclusion, regardless of what kind of website that you have or plan to create, these five pages should be among the first, if not the very first pages that you create. All of them will help you shape and focus your site and make it flow better for your visitors. As you can see at the bottom of this page, we believe highly in having these pages and use them for our website.
