Many of my clients are small business owners with less than 5 employees. When they decide to develop a web site or ditch the old one, it is often a daunting task, one they would prefer to keep to a minimum of pages. I love smaller projects because they provide an opportunity to be detail oriented and creative but this doesn’t mean I forget about the rules. Just because your business has a minimum number of employees does not mean your web site should have just as few pages.
There are endless possibilities to what you can put on a web site. Let’s start with the basics.
The navigation follows the site architecture, the overall hierarchical structure of the information to present. Navigation helps site visitors move around to easily find what they are looking for. Like a well-written book, your site should immediately answer the reader’s questions.
Perhaps you have visited a site where you could not find what you are looking for without getting frustrated. This could be because they named sections unusually or they buried important information deep within the site. This is a true sign of a poorly designed site architecture. Some small business owners do not clearly think through what the site would contain over time. Disorganization is sure to follow. Let us not be like them.
I am frequently asked about the bare minimum requirements for a service oriented site. No matter how small your business, your site should contain at least the nine pages listed below. The following list is my adopted best-practice menu taken from Jeanna Pool’s proven marketing strategies in the book, When Your Small Business is YOU™ Marketing Handbook (listed in order of importance):
For Service:
Home Page
Services
Portfolio/Case Studies
Why Choose Us
Who We work with
Testimonials
About
Process
Contact
Your web site should immediately present a scenario to appeal to prospective clients. It should not talk about your firm, your background, or why you are so wonderful on the home page. It should present a story about the outcomes your clients will receive when they work with you. There are several formulas to follow such as Dr. Tom Sant’s. All of them have the same idea: speak to your clients about their problem, present solutions to their problem, show (don’t tell) how your services solve their problem, and illustrate the outcomes with examples. This should be done on the home, services, case studies, portfolio, and testimonials pages.
For product oriented sites, you need a shopping cart. A product web site has additional navigation requirements to answer questions, illustrate outcomes, and process orders. These include (in order of importance):
For Products:
Home Page
Features
Demo
Reviews
Purchase
Your Cart
Your Account
Support / Help
Downloads
Contact
Terms and Conditions
Privacy Policy
Returns Policy
For both product and service sites, you can expand the navigation to integrate updated materials such as news, articles, links, events, and recent clients pages. Your site’s additional contents follow your marketing plan. For instance, if you have committed to article writing or blogging to educate potential clients and become more visible on the web, then you should publish your articles to a document library on your site as well as to article submission sites. A link to your blog should be featured on your site and can also appear on your LinkedIn and FaceBook pages. Facebook can be setup to automatically list blog entries by title on your profile page.
All of your site’s content should be integrated with print and article materials so that you are consistently linking back to your site for more information. Not meeting the bare minimum in your navigation creates more questions than answers for site visitors.
There are additional sections you can add for either product or service sites. These include (in order of importance):
Additional Pages For Both Product and Service:
Client List
E-Newsletter Sign Up (if you publish one)
Recent News
Articles
Awards
FAQs
Brochure Download
Online Community
Client Login
Privacy Policy
Schedule of Events
Resources
Press Kit download
Search
Free E-book Downloads / OnDemand Podcasts
Site Map
Remember, the main objective of your site is to attract potential clients and engage existing clients by answering all of their questions and delivering solutions to their problems. It doesn’t matter how big or small your firm is. A thoughtfully designed site following best-practice recommendations will do more than pay for itself.
To learn more about navigation best-practice read this article on A List Apart
Here is a great article to inform you and help you keep your web developer in check, Web Developer’s Journal
And my favorite guru on usability, Dr. Jakob Nielsen, principal, Nielsen Norman Group Alertbox. Read the article, Is Navigation Useful?
