Content is the most important thing on your website. Period.

You can have the prettiest, smoothest, fastest website on the internet, but if your content isn’t up to snuff, even the best design and fanciest tech won’t be able to save it. That’s not to say that tech and design aren’t important, but your customers go to your website to easily access information, not to marvel at a really well-animated navigation menu. On top of all of this, search engines prioritize good content, so making sure that what is on your website is beneficial and high quality can help your SEO rankings as well.

To help you figure out what should be on your website, I’m going to go over some general guidelines for where information is normally found on the most common individual pages. The easiest way to start is to figure out what pages you want and fill them in one by one. As I’ve talked about before, Biller Designs’ client onboarding process includes a shared Google Document called a Content Plan for just this purpose; to get everyone organized and keep the information up to date and correct.

Home

This is your virtual first impression. You want your colors, fonts, and general visual style to be cohesive and recognizable throughout the whole website and the first time visitors see that style is on your homepage. Some things that can help achieve this are:

Business Logo – This is who you are. Make sure it’s front and center.
Tagline – A few words to sum up what you do or who you serve
Branding Identity – This is that visual style I was talking about. I’m going to talk more about it next week, so stay tuned!
“Above the Fold” Information – This is a term adapted from newspapers to refer to what you see on your screen before you scroll. You want to make sure that you have your best stuff “above the fold” and that it is arranged in such a way to encourage visitors to scroll and see more. Making that happen is more of a designer thing, but it’s good for you to think about when you’re writing content for any particular page.

About

Like I have talked about before, this is where you can help your customer get to know you and your business a little more personally. If you love dogs or are passionate about a local nonprofit, this is a great place for that kind of information. This page is also where you introduce your customers to the good folks behind the scenes on your team.

Mission/Purpose – This can sometimes be its own page, but if it’s short, this is a good place for it.
Your Whole Team – Depending on how many team members you have, sometimes this is just a section of photos, names, and titles with links to their individual pages. If you have a small team, you could potentially just do a short profile of each person on this page alone. It really depends on how many total pages you want on your site. Either way, this is where your bio goes.

Products/Services

This type of page is really dependant on your business model. If you sell products (virtual or physical) and also offer services, it can be more streamlined to have them on two separate pages. Here are some examples of Products or Services content:

If you are an e-commerce business, this is where your store is.
If you are a restaurant, this is your menu.
If you are a salon, this is where your prices and services are listed and described.

Contact

This page is where your potential customers find out when and how to reach you. That is really important! It is best to have several ways to get in touch, such as email, phone, or even a form to fill out to make it super easy.

This is also the place to have information about your business hours, and the addresses of physical business locations.
Be sure and have all of your social media here, too. That said, your social media needs to be (tastefully) all over the website- in the footer, sidebar, etc.- to encourage customer engagement.

Having a beautiful website is great. It fosters trust in you and ups the professionalism factor significantly. But to get the full benefits of a beautiful website, you need to have high quality, accurate information about you and your business. That’s what will keep customers interested and buying from you!

-CB

You know that you need to have an online presence to help support your business, but you’re not really sure how to go about getting one. Or, it could be that your current website just needs to be freshened up. What do you do?

You could make a go of it yourself. There are lots of user-friendly drag and drop editors, but it will probably take a bit of time to get familiar with the platform to set it up properly. You could definitely go with a designer (we can recommend a pretty good one). They are already up to speed on how the platforms work and how best to set up everything on the technical side. They’re also generally much faster and you’ll get your very professional and wonderful site up and running very quickly. Ultimately, it’s your call for what’s best for your business.

Either way, you’re going to have to get yourself organized. If you’ve decided to work with a web designer, congratulations! Hopefully, they will have a plan to discover the best setup for your website, get all of the information about your business, and put together a fantastic project for you. Even if they don’t have a point by point plan, they are still going to need some information from you. At Biller Designs, we do an initial discovery session where we find out everything we can about your business. Then, based on our findings and your business goals, we set up a shared Google document that we call a Content Plan to help make sure all of the information you want on your website makes it on there accurately.

In the meantime, I’m going to give you some helpful hints on how to decide what needs to be on your website, how to organize it, and where to find content if you don’t have enough to fill your site. This is helpful whether you’re DIYing your website or working with a designer.

I will talk more in depth about the Content Plan next week, but before you get too in the weeds, it’s good to have an overall idea of what information you want on your website. Once you have a basic idea, you can start to organize the pieces of information. Finally, you can figure out what specific content goes on each individual page.

What’s the Big Idea?

Until you actually have to sit down and write it, thinking about what information needs to go on your website sounds pretty easy. “Sure,” you think, “this will be super easy and fast.” Then, four hours later, you’ve consumed six cups of coffee, torn yourself away from social media a dozen times, Googled, “What goes on a website,” and still only have a sentence or two written down. Let’s break it down.

Pages

Most websites will have between 4 and 6 primary pages. Home, About, Contact, and Products or Services are some examples of items that most businesses will need. I like to start with those when listing the pages I will need on my site, and add additional pages underneath them as I go. Once you’ve listed all of the pages you need, it’s time to organize them into navigation.

Navigation

You don’t want to get too crazy with the number of navigation tabs, so keeping your main navigation limited to your primary pages is a good rule of thumb. What you’re creating is essentially a hierarchical organization of all of your website’s planned pages. If you end up with pages that clearly need their own tab, you can adjust for that, too. That’s another reason that it’s important to plan it out beforehand or you waste a lot of time with your designer trying to figure out how your site should be set up. The final list of planned pages is what you will use to gather the content for each page.

Content

When you are deciding what information goes on which page, the most important piece of the puzzle is clarity. It needs to be very clear to a person who has never been to your website where everything is and how to find the information they need. Things like return policies, shipping costs, contact information, and business hours should be located in multiple obvious places. After all, if your customers or clients can’t find information on your website quickly and easily, they will just go somewhere else. Your content is the most important piece of your website, but don’t worry, because like I said earlier, I’m going to go over this section in a lot more detail next week.

All of these things are just as important for a new business as an established one. An established business just refreshing their website has information on their current site to work with, though it often needs updating. When building a brand new business, you’re going to have to potentially create a lot of verbiage around your mission, your services, your products or services, your pricing, and (gasp!) your bio! This is critical to conveying your business to your potential customers and it is not something that can be done in an afternoon. Make a plan, set goals to finish one page per day or work with a business coach to get your language just right. Your website will thank you.

-CB <3

Something I don’t say in my bio is that I have worked in specialty retail for a long time; most of my professional life, in fact. Beginning in high school, I worked for a local gift shop that was basically a Hallmark store on steroids, then I sold fine jewelry for JC Penney and Gordon’s Jewelers, and when I moved to San Marcos, TX after grad school, I worked in my most favorite job to date: the Calphalon Kitchen Outlet.

There were so many things about that job that made it special- the product (super high quality), the parent company (amazing), my coworkers (hard-working and fantastic), and my amazing boss (#ladyboss forever <3), to name a few. It was one of those jobs that mostly didn’t feel like work. It was just a place you went to do something you believed in and cared about. I know it sounds silly to say that I woke up every morning excited to sell cookware to people, but boy, I sure did.

Being a “Good Salesperson”

Even though most of my job experience to that point had been sales related, the Calphalon Kitchen Outlet had something that none of my other jobs did. Their onboarding process for a new employee was extremely thorough, and while they obviously had great product training, the missing piece from my previous jobs was the sales training portion. The Calphalon Kitchen Outlet had very specific, step-by-step, intentional, and incredibly effective sales training. Looking back, that training shaped how I have engaged with customers ever since. It not only gave a framework for selling, but that framework was built on providing the best product for the customer, not just selling the highest priced thing and squeezing as much money out of each interaction as possible.

I’ve been told that I’m a “good salesperson,” but that’s not entirely true. To me, being a “good salesperson” that can “sell anything” isn’t really a good thing. I also don’t think that it is what a business actually needs or wants. Obviously, businesses want employees who can sell, but selling just to make money without concern for your customers isn’t good business. During hiring at Calphalon, I remember passing over candidates who seemed like they were just out to sell the most expensive item they could because that wasn’t what we were about. For my money, it is a much better long-term strategy to find solutions for your customers; even if that means selling the least expensive product you carry or even recommending that they shop at a competitor. When customers can tell that you truly have their best interest in mind, they become repeat customers. 

They can also smell dishonesty a mile away. If you are genuinely confident in your product and have learned enough about your customer to be able to sincerely say, “Yes, this item is going to meet your needs because…”, customers will buy from you. That is why I am a good salesperson: because I listen to customers, learn about their needs, and find them solutions based on those needs.

The Business of Listening

So, friends, I’m sure you can see how this makes sense for Biller Designs’ web and graphic design clients. I faithfully apply these same selling principles in my business now as I always have. When you tell me that you need a website, I want to learn all I can about what your goals are, who your customer is, why you started your business, what is important to you, and everything in between so that when I put together a plan for your website, it’s going to do the things that make sense for your business and do them well. That just seems like good business practice to me, but then again, I cut my teeth in retail and have seen firsthand what happens when pushy salespeople convince customers to buy garbage they don’t need: customers get mad because their needs aren’t met and they return their purchases! Not a good situation when what you purchased was a website that potentially cost thousands of dollars. Usually, you’re stuck with that website until you find someone who is willing to listen to you and work with you to build something that works for you and represents your business.

Maybe Biller Designs is that person for you, and maybe not. Above all, I want customers to find solutions that work best for them. All I’m saying is that I’d love to hear every detail about your business and create something you and I can both be proud of.

-CB