Below we've identified various components that you might want consider including in your own website. Whilst some of them are 'usual suspects', the decision to include some of the less common components will depend on the type of website you have in mind & your initial budget etc.
The core site pages are the body of the website and will convey the information about the products, services and organisations.
A simple five page website might consist of the following pages:
The core site can be further categorised as brochure pages (e.g. Home, About, Contact, Links) or catalogue pages which normally hold products. Whilst a starting point for these pages could be the content you may have developed for a traditional off-line printed brochure, we'd recommend reviewing the content against our good practice guidelines set out in our ' Copywriting for Search Engines' section.
An on-line shop (sometimes known as checkout pages) will allow visitors add & remove products or services to/from their 'basket' and 'checkout', view shipping rates, tax charges, specify the delivery information & pay.
The shop pages are often built using 'off the shelf' shopping cart software solutions. In the case of our own clients' shops they fall into the following categories:
Usually shoppers are taken to a secure third party to to specify sensitive payment information like credit card details. For more information on payment options see our E-commerce page.
Blog websites can be set up using free services provided by sites such as Blogger.com. With these services you can login to manage the blog, publishing new posts that can be read on-line by anyone choosing to visit your blog.
By linking between your main website and your blog you can extend your on-line presence with the blog providing the opportunity to publish new content on-line free of charge as frequently as you wish.
Visitors can join your your forum to participate by creating & responding to discussions threads. Because forums allow visitors to contribute to the website via the forum, it's necessary for a moderator to oversee the posts to help maintain the quality of the contributions.
Where the website content needs to be updated frequently a Content Management System (CMS) from any computer where the user/s can login with an Internet browser such as the one you are using to view this page.
In practice using a CMS to manage your website is very similar to managing a Facebook profile or On-line bank account where your are presented a series of pages where you select various options, upload images & key in text etc.
As you'd expect a gallery can be used to present images. It can be linked to a content management system (please see below) that would allow you to manage the contents of the gallery by uploading and deleting images from your own computer. We're happy to provide advice on anything you might be unsure about regarding uploading photos to your gallery.
