So you’ve decided what you want your site to do for you and what message you’d like your website to deliver to your customers. What’s the next step? It’s time to decide how many basic pages you are going to need. This is done by deciding on the types of information you are going to want on your website, and of course what kind of budget you are working with.

Some businesses can deliver all of their pertinent information in a three page site. The home, or landing page can have some photos and basic information about the business and the goods or services it provides. The Contact page can have all of the ways your client can find you and interact with you: a map, address, directions, phone number, physical address, email address, social media links. This page can also hold more photos and/or more in depth information about the business or owners. The third page could be a price list, a blog, or any other information that is necessary to deliver information for your business to your clients.

Other businesses just have too much information to deliver to get it done in three pages.  With our client, she wanted a clean landing page that didn’t have a bunch of information crowding it, so all of the information that was going to be delivered was going to need to be in other pages.

She wanted a schedule page, both so clients could see the hours that her business was open and so that they could utilize their on-line booking feature. She wanted a page with the services and prices. She wanted a contact page so clients could get one-touch directions, and contact the business with any questions they may have. She wanted to show off the work of her business, so she needed a Gallery page for images. She wanted to make sure that perspective clients could get a sense of what the business was about and who worked at the business, so she wanted an About page with staff pages within that. Finally, she wanted a page for their blog.

So, right out of the gate, we knew we were starting with a minimum of a seven page site, but there were pages within the pages, so we next needed to determine how many sub-pages we were going to build out. In the end, we needed two pages under the Schedule page, one for hours and one that landed on their online booking site. The Gallery would have three pages: client hair and makeup as well as salon images. The About page would hold individual pages of the 6 team members that work at the business. This brought the base total up to 18 pages.

With that, we were ready to move on to the next step. Stay tuned!