Which pages a company website needs

A company website is a site that explains what a company does, who it does it for, and how to reach it. The question of which pages it needs usually gets answered from a template: home, about, services, contact. The template is not wrong, but it does not say why those pages exist, and so every page fills up with the same generic sentences.

A page is the answer to a question

A visitor arrives at a company website with a few questions and asks them in roughly the same order: What does this place do? Is it any use to me? Can these people be trusted? How does it work? How do I get in touch?

Every page should be the answer to one of those questions. A page that answers none of them becomes the page that takes up space in the menu and nobody opens.

Home: what you do

The home page’s job is one sentence: what the company offers and to whom. That sentence should be visible on the first screen, without scrolling.

“We shape the future” does not answer the question. “Warehouse management software for mid-sized manufacturers” does. The first looks better; the second works.

The rest of the home page is a distribution point: it takes the visitor to the answer to their own question, which is the relevant service page.

A separate page for each service

The most common mistake is listing every service on a single “Our services” page, three lines each.

People type their need into a search engine, not a type of company. None of six services mentioned on one page shows up for its own search, because that page is not the page for any of them.

When each service has its own page, that page can say who the service is for, what it covers, what it does not cover, how it runs, and what gets asked most often. Those five headings also shorten the first half hour of the sales call.

About: why you can be trusted

On most sites the about page is a founding year and a vision statement. What the visitor is looking for there is something else: who does the work.

Names, faces, who handles what, and how the work gets done. On a small team this page can be the one that builds the most trust on the site, because the visitor sees they will be working with a person, not a logo.

Work or products: the evidence

Saying what you do is a claim; showing it is evidence. This page shows the work that was done: what the problem was, what was done, what the result was.

The page can still be written for work where the client cannot be named. Describing the kind of work and the approach is better than showing nothing. If there is no work to show, it is better not to open this page at all than to fill it with made-up content.

Contact: the next step

The contact page’s job is not to give an address. It is to make the next step easy.

A short form, who the form goes to, and how long a reply will take. That last piece is missing on most sites, and it is what most affects the decision to fill in the form or not.

Legal pages

Privacy policy, cookie policy and terms of use. Nobody comes to read them, but on a site that uses forms and analytics they have to be there, and their content has to match what the site actually does.

Six pages, six questions

1. Home: what you do, and for whom.
2. Service pages: does it meet my need.
3. About: who does the work.
4. Work or products: have you done this before.
5. Contact: what the next step is.
6. Legal pages: what you do with my data.

Pages like a blog, careers and frequently asked questions come on top of these. But while these six are missing, every page added sits next to a question left unanswered.