Paying attention to website design is crucial to building your business. There are now nearly 1.7 billion websites online, which provide a lot of different types of websites to study, but also a lot of confusion over which type and design will actually work best for you.
As a designer or small business owner, you need to be familiar with all the different kinds of web design out there, so you can decide which will meet your needs. Studying what competitors chose and conducting testing allow you to create the perfect format for each brand and their customer base. These are typically the most important pages to an optimization campaign.
Home Page
The home page is usually one of the single most visited pages of any website and, just as often, the first page a visitor sees.
But whether a visitor lands on your home page first or navigates there from an internal page, they have certain expectations of what they’ll find.
The home page must provide a global view of what the website offers. It should give visitors the “big picture” of the products and services you offer and why they should do business with you.
Your home page acts as a doorway for the visitor to enter and begin their journey into your site where they’ll find more details about what you offer.
About Us Page
The About Us page is one of the most important pages on your customer’s website. It is an opportunity where their visitors get to know their company. This is a chance for your customers’ to introduce themselves and the kind of business they do to their clients. So you might as well make it great!
As visitors arrive on your customer’s landing page, they are hoping for a piece of introductory content, such as what/when/where/how details, which has to do with the About Us page. It’s a click away from the homepage, where it’s most required to make a quick impression.
Contact us Page
Almost all of the websites we design have a Contact Us page. This page is the hub for getting in touch with your company. It provides different methods of contact for potential customers, and is very easy to find. A typical Contact Us page should have your company’s phone number, address, or email address.
There is pretty much only one reason a visitor will intentionally navigate to a Contact Us page. They want your contact information.
What they actually do with that information is anyone’s guess. Maybe they’ll send you an email, maybe they’ll call, or maybe they just want to know where you’re located. It is important to tailor your website to your company’s needs and provide good opportunities for people to contact you.
Feed Page
Feed (or news feed) page is found on the websites that often update content. In other words, it’s a content stream users can scroll through and check what’s been updated on the website. On the feed page, the content is presented in blocks or elements that are similar and repetitive. For instance, an editorial feed will be presented by the list of news or articles whereas on the social networking site the feed will often show the updates from the followed users or pages. Also, the presentation of the feed can be different from text-only and super minimalist to the one using big complex blocks of content including both text and media like photos, illustrations, or even video previews.
Search Page
This page presents a feed of internal search results after the user typed in the request in the search field. The look of the page may be very different, from simple text list to big blocks with images; the choice of solution for the content presentation on this page depends on what is most important for the target audience. The core requirement for the search page – except the well-adjusted results, of course – is high scannability of the layout and instantly readable headings or titles, as that is the page where users usually quickly skim what they see to find the needed option. Also, the essential thing to remember is to leave the search query visible on the page of results so that users wouldn’t need to keep it in mind and check if it was typed correctly in case the results aren’t very good.
Registration Page
A signup page (also known as a registration page) enables users and organizations to independently register and gain access to your system. It is common to have multiple signup pages depending on the types of people and organizations you want to register. If possible, offer users various ways of registration, including the so-called lazy registration via social networks. As well, consider some onboarding for first-time visitors to make the interactions and registration easy from the very beginning.
404 Page
You’re browsing a website when suddenly you reach a page that says something like “Sorry, page not found.”
You may have mistakenly typed in the wrong URL or clicked on a broken link. Whatever the reason, it’s important to get to where you need to go.
The best way to execute this is by reaching a nifty, custom 404 page to redirect you.
404 pages can be a serious tool for misguided visitors. It can also be a sign of lack of UX and attention to detail if not customized and implemented properly.
Landing pages
A landing page is a specific page type created for a marketing campaign that drives visitors to take a specific action.
The content on a landing page should be limited and point toward the call-to-action (CTA) you’d like the user to take. Allow plenty of white space around your CTA and save elements not related to the purpose of that campaign for other pages.
Shopify’s free trial landing page provides simple headlines and calls to action, such as “Start free trial.” All the elements on the page drive the buyer through a very specific journey meant to have them become a qualified lead. They use relevant, trendy images and add a bit of a 3D effect with the sunglasses in the corner while also showing what one of their shopping sites layouts looks like.
Blog Pages
A blog features regularly updated articles, photos and videos. Blogs started with more casual, personal content compared to magazines. But since then, the lines have blurred, and now it’s extremely common for major brands and businesses to have their own blog. Adding expert content improves the overall credibility of a company or an individual. Blogs also provide material for social media posts and email campaigns.
However, a blog can also become cumbersome for smaller companies. Make sure you have a team and strategy in place to keep content fresh before you consider launching one. It’s actually better not to have a blog and instead offer a few videos or guides, than to have a hopelessly outdated blog.
Article Pages
You are designing a News Site, Portal Site or similar site, where users come to read stuff. What users are reading are ‘articles’ and not longer stories that you may find in online brochure or dossier.
Every article page you may encounter will have a slightly different format but most of them share these basic elements:
- Header, in a large font size and preferable not spanning more than one line
- Publication date, in a small font size
- Photograph with caption, half or the column width or the entire width.
- Introduction text, which often serves as sort of a summary as well
- Body text, the real content of the article
- Links to related articles, either external or internal articles.
In order to make the site a bit more interactive, sites with article pages also allow people to react on the article.
Portfolio Pages
As it’s clear from the name, this type of page is typical for websites whose goal is professional presentation.
A portfolio website allows creative professionals a place for showcasing their best work. This is perfect for artists, writers, designers, filmmakers, furniture builders—you name it.
As you build a portfolio, there’s no need to add every single project you’ve ever worked on. Instead, focus on creating categories of items and highlighting the best work from each category. A portfolio website is a bit more creative by nature, so this is the place to try unique layouts and add in interesting features.
Services Page
Your services page is one of the most critical pages on your website whose purpose is to not only reveal what you offer but how your company stands out from the rest. It starts with the messaging. If your services are visual, a variety of photography/graphics accompanying the content may help put everything together.
Product Page
The product page is one of the vital pages on all kinds of e-commerce websites. This page gives all the needed information about the product, allows users to check the photos and different color/model options, see the reviews and ratings from earlier buyers, add the product to cart or wish list. A badly-designed product page may waste all the effort taken to bring the buyer to the website and to this particular product. So, focus on functionality, clarity, readability, and make CTA buttons instantly noticeable.
Certainly, this list of web pages isn’t full yet, however, hopefully, this list will be helpful for not only designers beginning their way in web design, but also clients who will be better armed to answer the question like “What pages would you like to have on your website?” Stay tuned!
