Pages Your Website Must Have
by Jason Ryan Isaksen

Your testimonial page and other pages that your website must have There are a few basic types of pages that all websites should have. Just like a cover, a table of contents, and index is expected to be in all educational books, there are certain items that are expected to be on your website. Here they are:

1. "About Us" page - This page describes who you are as an individual or company and what your purpose of having a website is. It may tell a brief story of how you started your business, how it's grown, who uses your website, etc. Anything you think is interesting and unique about you and your company is perfect for your "About Us" page.

2. "Contact Us" page. Be sure to have a "Contact Us" link on every page of your website so the people that visit your website won't have to look all over for it. Believe it or not, people will actually think you are hiding from the public if you don't make it extremely easy and clear how they can contact you. One of the best kept secrets to increasing your sales is to list your contact information in several different locations throughout your website. List your contact info on the top, bottom, and side of your page. It's difficult to over-do this one. Obviously the purpose of this button and page is to tell your readers how to get in contact with you. This page should provide your phone number, fax number, email address, and physical mailing address. If it's not possible for you to answer your phone during the day, you can still list your phone number as long as you have voice mail or an answering machine hooked up to it. Never list a phone number that is not being answered and doesn't have voice mail or an answering machine. By the way, if you can personally answer your phone during the business day, you'll immediately double and in some cases triple your sales!

3. "Privacy Policy" This button and page tells your readers your policy on what you do with your readers personal contact information. Your privacy policy lets them know if you sell their email address, phone number, or physical address. It's standard for most privacy policies to explain that the company will never rent, sell or distribute any personal information except within their own company or network. You'll have to decide if you want to sell your users information or not. If you do plan to sell your users email addresses, names, phone numbers, or physical addresses, then I would just completely leave the privacy policy button and page off your website. There's no law that I'm aware of that says you must have a privacy policy posted on your website. But knowing our government, I wouldn't be surprised if they starting forcing us to post a privacy policy on our websites.

4. "Home" - A button that says "Home" is absolutely necessary on every page of your website. It's simply a "Must Have" item. That way your readers can always find an easy way to get back to your main or first web page. That's just considered part of good navigation.

5. "Testimonials" A "Testimonials" button allows your readers to read actual letters or emails that you've received from satisfied customers in the past. These testimonials often explain some specific details of your product, services, or business in general that made your customer very happy in the past. Again, you don't have to have a testimonials page, but these days you're practically expected to. And if you don't have a testimonials page, your customers will either think you're a brand new business and don't have any customers yet. Or they'll think you've been around a while, but nobody really likes your products or services enough to tell you about it. Letting your customers believe either one of these scenarios is bad for you.

6. "News" "Updates" "Press Release" - These three different types of buttons all basically serve the same purpose on your site. They let visitors to your website know what's hot within your organization. Many people on the internet are news junkies that always want to know of any exciting fresh news that's hot off the press within your company or website. This is probably the least important of all buttons listed above, but if done right, this button and page will increase your sales and conversion rate. And as you know, that means more money in your pocket!

7. "Links Page" This page is sometimes referred to as your "Resources" page or "Other related links" page. This page only contains links to other useful sites that are related to your industry or subject matter. This page acts as a resource tool so your customers can learn more about your industry or subject matter. This page will probably not be a good idea for you to list in your immediate menu. The greatest benefit you'll get from this "Links" page is search engine popularity. Yes, search engines give your website higher rankings when it has both incoming and outgoing links to other related sites in your same industry. Especially when they contain some of the main "Target" keywords as your website does.

The reason you shouldn't put your "links" button in your regular menu at the top of your site is because the visitors to your website could quickly become interested in some other website you have on your links page and click right out of your website. Then you would have basically just given that traffic to the other companies listed on your links page. So I like to kind of keep my links button hidden at the very bottom of my page. In fact I don't even like to make it a button. I just make it a text link that says "links" And I keep it really small because the only people I really want to see that page are the search engine robots that come to my site to scan it for relevancy and popularity in order to decide how high to list it.

8. "FAQ Page" - As you know, FAQ stands for "Frequently Asked Questions" and this is an important page for any site since as we talked about above, there are no sales people standing around on the internet. So if people don't quite understand your website, system, program, product, or service, they'll simply move on to the next site unless you have a good FAQ page that answers the most commonly asked questions of the people that visit your website.

Also try to view your website with different browsers. Test your website using both Internet Explorer and Netscape both. And also test older versions of them because obviously millions of people are still using older computers with older browsers on them. There's a software program that automatically tests your website in several different browsers for you. Just log into the members only website to find out more about it.

I've seen many of my students find out the reason they're losing a lot of sales is because their web page is coming up wrong, strange, or broken on different browsers. And it's sad when they find this out after a year of spending bunches of time and money promoting their site. Another easy way to test your website on multiple browsers is to call up your friends, relatives, and business associates and ask them to type your website address into their browser on their own computer to test it for you. I recommend you have several people check your website for you before you decide that it's perfect. Be sure to ask them which browser they're using and keep track of that info.