WordPress has come a long way in its journey to become the #1 blogging platform out there today. As the features and functionality have increased over time, the possibilities for what can be done with WordPress as a website solution have increased. With today’s features, WordPress can be used to create an entire site in most cases in addition to just a blog. This article discusses which pages should be created in any WordPress blog.
1. Landing Page or Home Page
The landing page or home page, depending upon the type of web site, is critical in being able to convert your visitors to taking a specific action. It is very difficult to do that with blog entries as the home page. When people land on your blog home page, they usually land on a page with a lot of content and nothing really directing them to do anything. If any of your blog titles happens to catch their attention, then when they click on a specific post, you may be able to convert that into an action, but only if your post is written up to do just that. If not, then you will just have a reader who may or may not come back to your site.
Having a landing page will allow you to prepare the visitor and guide them through the site the way you want them to go.
2. Contact Us Page
WordPress makes it easy to put a contact us form on your website that will get emailed back to you when the visitor submits the form. There are a few ‘contact us’ plug-ins that give the website owner a lot of flexibility in getting the kind of feedback that will be most beneficial to them. One of the contact form plugins that gives a lot of flexibility in creating great forms called ‘Contact Form 7’.
The benefit of having a contact form instead of your email is it is easier to manage communications, you can outsource your customer support much more easily and you can guide the visitor much better with the information you need from them so you can better serve your visitors, prospects and customers.
3. Blog Postings Page
If you are going to have a WordPress website, then you should have a blog as well. WordPress is a blogging platform so it pretty much comes with the territory. In this case, you will need to create a separate page to direct the blog postings to.
When setting up the blog page, you will need to be sure to label it something that is very clear and enticing if you want your visitors to read your blog postings. Labels like ‘Blog’, ‘Articles’ and ‘Content’ are fairly popular. This is the name that will be on the navigation link for that page as well. This is why it is important to make it something that is easy for visitors to understand.
Creating an entire website from WordPress is easy to do with the latest versions of WordPress. It is very easy to create the basic pages that will allow a small business owner to get a website up and running very quickly. Having a landing page, a contact us page and a blog page is a great foundation to build from. Once that foundation is there, additional pages and features can be easily added.
