Main Pages of a Website

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

• Homepage: The start page of your website, it should entice users to click through to other pages on the site. Any products or offers you are promoting, exciting news, or high impact content should be visible here.
• About Page: Tells visitors about your company, its history/story, and brand values. Use this page to build a relationship with potential customers who share your vision/values and are likely to react positively to your brand story.
• Contact Page: Allows visitors to get in touch with your company by email, phone, or show a map location. Make this page simple and straightforward, ensure your phone number is visible, keep your contact forms short and only ask for information you actually need. Use a CAPTCHA to reduce spam or bot contact requests. Use Schema Markup for your contact information so search engines can find and categorize this information much easier.
• Product Category Pages: Shows visitors collections of product/service groupings you offer. A grid layout, for example, can make your offering easy for people to understand. Have no more than 4 items wide on a desktop and 2 items wide on a mobile.
• Product Pages: Gives specific details about individual products/services that you offer. Include prices, delivery charges, and clear Call-To-Action (CTA) buttons like "Add to Cart" or "Enquire Now".
• Shopping Cart: A place where people can add items they are thinking about buying. Show people a list of all items they are considering purchasing and the quantity for each. Include the total cost for these items and any delivery charges in your totals.
• Checkout: The stage after the cart, when people decide to buy – here they enter their name, address and payment details to purchase. Don’t ask for any information you don’t need to fulfill the purchase (for example, age or gender). Ensure your checkout is mobile optimized and easy to read on smaller mobile screens. Ensure also that the keyboard changes to the email keypad for email address fields and the number keypad entering phone numbers.
• Payment Gateway: A third-party integration with your website that allows visitors to enter their credit card details and pay for whatever they are purchasing. It is essential to know your customers’ preferred payment type and allow them to pay as they choose.
• Lead Collection Pages and Web Forms (Lead Generation): Provides an overview of the lead magnet and tells/shows the visitor why they should enter their contact details into a web form in return for access to the lead magnet. Include a short compelling description of the lead magnet to set expectations for visitors so they know what they’re getting.

Supporting pages

Supporting pages help build your brand experience and drive positive affinity from website visitors.

• Blog: Use your blog to provide useful information to your customers to allow them to understand your brand and help them make up their minds to choose you as the solution to their needs.
• News: Keep people up to date with developments in your company. Use this section to show how dynamic your company is. If you don’t typically have a lot of news, don’t create a news section – you’ll struggle to keep it up to date and website visitors won’t be interested in old or useless news.
• FAQs: Provides answers to commonly asked questions about your business, products or services. Look at common queries from customers in your social media comments (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter), contact requests, and online chat and proactively provide these answers.

Note: It can be a good idea to use FAQs to deal with common objections. An objection is a reason or an excuse that someone uses to not buy from you, such as: "I don’t have time", "I don’t have the budget", or "I’m happy with my current supplier". If you have a sales team, ask them for insights into common objections as inspiration for content for your FAQ page. Proactively dealing with objections in your FAQs such as “Why our prices seem higher than our competitors” you give space to the visitor to explore your answers in their own time, which can help them make up their mind rather than brushing you off entirely.

• Testimonials: Allows visitors to read third-party reviews from your customers. This is a very powerful way to drive positive referrals from your customers.
• Cookie and Privacy Policy: Lets visitors know how you handle their data.
• Terms and Conditions: Lets visitors know the details of your sales contract and returns/refund policy. These are standard pages to comply with consumer protection and data protection legislation locally and globally.
• Thank You/Purchase Confirmation Pages: Tells users that a web form or contact form has been successfully submitted, or if they have bought something on an eCommerce website, that their payment has been successful and their order received. These are valuable pages as the user has just given you their contact details (for lead gen) or their credit card details and paid (for eCommerce). You now have the opportunity to engage with them further by giving them access to new content or directing them towards interesting or relevant content on your website to keep them positively engaging with your brand.
• 404 Error Page Not Found: Lets people know that the page they are looking for can’t be found. This page is often overlooked and a standard "PAGE NOT FOUND" message will be shown. However, there is an opportunity to engage with your visitors in a light-hearted or interesting way. When done correctly, it can help them understand a little more about your brand personality.