2.4 Structure of a Website

Here we are on the final episode of this second chapter.

You have learnt a lot about how to look at businesses, audiences and even different kinds of websites that have different purposes. We’ve taken the time to go over the fundamentals because that’s what's really going to really separate you from the rest. 

This episode is going to help you see how websites are structured. The structure of a website is crucial to effectively communicate with your audience. Let us talk about why this is important.

Take for example the way you have conversations in real life.
When starting a conversation with a person you just met, you aren't necessarily going to dive in and tell them about your difficult childhood and that ex you’re still not over. You will first introduce yourself, give them some general information about yourself, and then based on how the conversation goes, you go further in.

Websites are not very different. When someone arrives on your website, they are probably seeing you for the first time. At this point, you want to treat them like someone who has just met you. You want to introduce yourself, talk broadly about who you are and what you do and then based on what the person wants to know more about, you go deeper.

So how do you really do that? Well let's take a look at how websites are structured together in the first place. Most websites are a bunch of web pages tied together. There are some key pages that all websites have like the homepage, the about page and contact page. It is possible to have just a one page website but a majority of them still have at least these 3 pages to start with.

A few other common pages that you might find on many websites are the services/products page, a blog page and a FAQ page. The services or products page are where you dive into what your business does, the FAQ caters to important questions you know your visitors want answered and lastly of course, the blog. 

So if you had a homepage, about page, contact page, services/products page, FAQ page and blog page, well you have a full website. And that is a decent starting point for us to understand websites. 

‍
However, not all brands want to structure their website in this way. They want to build a website that takes their visitors on a journey through the brand. And that's what we are going to address in this episode.

Back to the whole conversation analogy.
For you to build a website that first introduces the brand or business and the different things it does broadly, and then let the visitor choose where to dive in, the strategy is quite simple. And here is how it goes.

1. Consider your homepage to be that first introduction. At this point, the visitor is just seeing your brand for the first time and getting to know your brand. At the homepage level, you want to introduce yourself and talk broadly about the different things you visitor would be interested in knowing.
2. You pick the top 1, 2 or 3 things about your brand that the visitor might want to know more about and build pages for each of them. You can even put them all into one page -. But a lot of brands choose to break down their different offerings into different pages. These are called secondary pages.
3. Lastly you add pages around other essential information you need the visitor to know like an about page for them to dig deeper into who you are and a contact page for them to reach out to you. Let’s call these tertiary pages. 

And there you go. You now have a basic website structure. And this website structure is called a site map - a term pretty common in the web world. Let’s see this in action. 

Let’s look at a really good business. - www.beunsettled.co
Be Unsettled is basically a business that provides curated digital nomad packages that help you go live in a new country for a month where you can work remotely and explore the land with a bunch of other travelers from across the world. That sounds pretty brilliant, doesn’t it?
Anyways, the Beunsettled.com website is a great way to illustrate this strategy. 

Homepage - 

The homepage does the job of introducing you to the concept of curated remote working abroad, giving you a taste of the global community while also introducing you to their 3 core offerings - the global passport, retreats and their 4 - week lifestyle course. 

The 3 items are highlighted on the homepage giving you a quick overview of what they do. The homepage also does a great job of showing the culture and the general vibe of the brand.

‍

The secondary pages-

Each of their 3 prime offerings have a secondary page of their own. The global passport, the retreats and the course have dedicated secondary pages that allow a visitor to explore more of each service.The secondary pages have subpages as well because there are multiple retreats that need individual pages. But all of these pages fall into the secondary page category. 

So if someone’s only looking for a lifestyle course, these pages give them all the information they will need. 

‍

And then the Tertiary pages - 

They have a lot of tertiary pages to give you a real feel for the brand and the community.
They have a community page, an extensive about section with a lot of different aspects of who they are and how you can connect with them and even a blog page for you to visit. 

This website is a great example of how a website can be structured to first introduce the brand, showcase it’s primary services and create these journeys that people can take based on what they’re looking for. 

And that’s the end of chapter 2. We got you started with the important things you need to understand about a business before you build them a highly converting website. And then we went on to explain the significance of having to understand the purpose that the website is serving and even explained how you can do this. We took you through some very different examples of effective websites and finally we saw how websites are structured. 

And that’s all for chapter 2 of this series on building a highly converting website. See you guys in the next chapter!