My first website was a blog on blogger, but when I got serious about that blog enough to switch to WordPress, I was in a hybrid place between trying to do what all the professionals were doing in the least professional way (because it was a humor / shenanigans type of blog). And at some point, I started building other sites where I wanted to be more professional. But in each step of the way, I inevitably had to look at other websites and other blogs and see what they were doing in order to get an idea of an “industry standard.”
It always takes me tons of hours to do.
So… I compiled a list, so I can come back to it and save me tons of hours in the future. And I’m posting it here in hopes to save you hours of research. A lot of these page types are pretty evergreen.
Primary Essential Pages
- Home
- About
- Contact
- Blog / Newsletter
- Products / Services
Secondary Essential Pages
- Help
- FAQ
- Subscribe
- Reviews
- Portfolio
- Customer Service / Support
- User Pages / My account / Login…
- Visit Us / Find Us / Hours of Operation
- Categories
- Features
- Pricing
Featured Pages
- Landing Pages
- Verb Pages (i.e. Start a Blog, Redecorate your Living Room)
- For Pages (i.e. For Publishers, For Writers, For Designers)
- Apps
E-Commerce Pages / Products
- Product Descriptions
- Shop
- Shop Categories
- Cart
- Check Out
- Order History
- Your Account
Other Pages
- Start Here
- Freebies / Free Stuff
- Tutorials / Courses / Training
- Guides
- Resources
- Favorite Tools
- Press / Latest News
- Media Kit
- Events
- Jobs / Careers / Now Hiring
- Submission Guidelines
- Become an Affiliate
- Work with Us / Become a Partner
- Advertise with Us
- Corporate Information / Financials / Investors
- Corporate Site / International Sites
- Returns
- Shipping and Delivery
- Financing / Apply for Credit Card
Legal Pages
- Privacy Policy
- Affiliate Disclosure
- Terms and Conditions
- Licenses
- Refund Policy
- Support Policy
- Cookies Policy
- Disclaimers
Tech Pages
- Sitemap
- 404 Error Page
- Archives
- Search Results
Not all your pages need to be in your Primary Menu
A lot of websites put only the pages that help a person through their sales process on the home page in the primary navigation, and then put all the other pages and possibilities in the footer.
Think about online newspapers and some magazines like New York Times where the top part is really about the user experiencing their product, so basically news topics. Then the footer has all the options for other papers owned by them, corporate information, submission guidelines, become an affiliate… etc.
Think User Experience
It means nothing if you have something awesome to show someone and they can’t figure out how to work the machine to show it to them.
In that, your website is basically an app, a video game, a device people are trying to figure out how to make it work, and unless you want to publish a tutorial and force your readers into learning something new, you want to follow and mimic what everyone else is doing enough for people to figure it out.
The ones who really rock the user experience tend to focus on intuitive features. Like the idea that when you open Canva, having never used it before, one of the first places you are going to look for a tool bar is the left, and one of the first things you are going to look for is the ability to type text, add a photo, draw a shape… that’s why those options are there, and not much more than that. Too many options start to look like Photoshop’s toolbar where you have to take a college class and write a dissertation before you can figure out what all it CAN do let alone how to do it.
So when it comes to what pages, and what content you want on your site, you can improve the user experience by making sure…
- It’s easy to figure out how to use it
- You offer no more options than you need to
- You provide everything they expect
- Your site is intuitive to the human mind with placement of things
Think Content beyond Words
The internet is a playground for all kinds of media, hence the old school term, Multimedia.
And most people think of pages they have to have and then plan out the content they need to create for it, and/or they list the content they have and plan out the pages to house them. A little of both.
So in planning that, remember the internet is multimedia, so it’s more than just words and concepts, and it’s more than just photos.
In most cases, ideally, a good mix of the following is great content to constitute creation of a page to house it:
- Words
- Video
- Photos
- Illustrations
And you probably want to keep it down to a couple common things, like words and photos, or words and illustrations, or words and video.