After years of working in web design and successfully managing more than 1,000 projects, I’ve discovered one truth: Your website requires certain pages to be successful. These are the five key pages that are the most visited and most important for a typical service-based business:

“Services”

Content is the driving factor behind search results. If you have no content, it’s hard for search engines to find and index your pages, which means you show up less often in search results – not ideal.

One of the most effective ways to increase your footprint on the web is by creating detailed services pages. Be sure not to list your services on just one page; break down your services into specific pages and categories. Go even deeper and write subpages on those specific categories. The more detailed content you can provide, the better.

Moreover, you should tie your services pages to your blog and resources. Whenever you write a new article, and it’s categorized as a specific service, it should automatically appear on your services page as related content.

“Why Choose Us”

Your “Why Choose Us” page should be a clear explanation of your unique selling proposition and value to your client. Why should they choose you? Do you have three key reasons? Five? Seven? More? Make a list and create a detailed page out of it. You can even incorporate that content into various parts of your services page.

“About Us”

It’s no secret that people are coming to your website because they want to know more about you and what you do. Therefore, an “About Us” page is a must. The name of the page can change based on your industry and business. You could call it “Our Team,” “Company,” “About Us” or something of the like.

When writing copy for this page, be concise but thorough: Why did you start your business? What are you offering clients? What makes your services special and different? Including a mission statement that people can rally behind is always a plus, too.

Think of this page as your personal introduction to every client who may walk through your door. What do you want to leave them with? Decide, then write it down.

“Testimonials/Case Studies”

Nothing speaks to your skills and abilities quite like the words of satisfied customers. Showcasing a few five-star reviews is an effective way to let new visitors know that you’ve got what it takes to deliver great results. Testimonials go a long way in earning trust. Give potential clients peace of mind and showcase just how happy your former clients are on a separate page or as a design element throughout your website.

Sometimes, websites include testimonials on every page. If that is the case, it may be redundant to have a testimonials page listing them all. Instead, focus on a few key clients and write specific case studies on how you helped them. Include their logo, bio, what their core issues were, and how you helped resolve them. If you want to get even more detailed, include charts, graphics and illustrations of your process.

“Contact Us”

A website would pretty much be useless without a contact page. After all, how else would potential clients let you know they’re interested in learning more or becoming a client? It’s important that this page is clear and accessible. Your contact page isn’t the place to experiment with fancy fonts and strange colors. Whether you choose to have a full contact form or just list the important things (phone, e-mail, mailing address), make sure the information is simple and clear.

You might even consider listing your hours of operation and social media accounts on your contact page, too. The more ways to connect, the merrier. Don’t leave people in the dark about how they can find you.

Your Website Is a Living Document

Whether you’re in the middle of a redesign, creating a completely new website or thinking about a new internet marketing approach, understand that your website is never complete. It grows and changes as your business does. There’s nothing wrong with starting small, but remember, these five pages are the backbone of your website.

To that end, we’ve provided the seven elements of successful e-commerce landing pages so that you can grab their attention before it’s too late.

Transparent Navigation

Of the different types of web pages, an e-commerce landing page is the one that should offer the least resistance between the consumer’s arrival and their ability to act. A general rule of thumb for navigation is that it should take no more than three clicks of the mouse to get from any page on your site to their intended destination.

This means when you’re considering how your landing page will link to pages deeper into the website, eliminate any unnecessary detours that may lead them away from that all-important “buy now” button.

Substance Over Flash

Many web designers make the mistake of thinking you need blinking buttons or deceptive links to get consumers to buy things. If this is the case, then chances are their products simply aren’t high quality. Assuming yours are, your job becomes providing users with as much relevant information within the page as possible, as seen in this example for commercial fire extinguishers.

Be advised, however, that the key word here is “relevant information,” meaning that which will assist them in their purchase. It does not mean bombard them with sales pitches beyond the facts. Rather, strive for intelligent and compelling copy.

Use Space Efficiently

In landing pages or any web page for that matter, efficiency is measured through use of the available white space. Most users peruse a page from top left to bottom right, so you should have the most important bits of information in that order.

There should be opportunities for the user to go where you want them to along the way, either through links or buttons. As an example: Image-heavy landing pages with lots of white space use every opportunity to lead consumers toward a purchase.

Avoid Technical Issues

There is some leniency with other types of pages in terms of 404 Errors and the like, but e-commerce users usually have a low tolerance for those kinds of problems.

A link that leads nowhere or a button that doesn’t work can give the impression that your site can’t be trusted with their credit card information. Extensive testing is recommended.

Gather Reviews

The end-all for e-commerce pages is, of course, the conversion. This involves monetary exchange for either a product, a subscription, or a service. However, failure to convert isn’t a total loss. Much of e-commerce success is based on marketing, and much of online marketing is gathering consumer email addresses so you can approach them from different angles.

A potential customer may decide against a purchase at any given time, but they could be swayed by a landing page that features positive reviews from happy customers.

Use Social Media

This should be a no-brainer for any webpage in the modern era. Much of how you generate business online will come from visitors who share your products with their friends and family. Indeed, word-of-mouth is a powerful tool.

You can take advantage of this by making your landing page easy to share on the various platforms. In fact, sites like Twitter and Facebook have marketing tools available to target former visitors and remind them why they were interested as they browse their news feeds.

Choose Images Carefully

This is one of the more important aspects of an e-commerce landing page because product shoppers usually require visual confirmation of products before they make a purchase. Hosting platforms can limit the quality of your images according to available space, making smart compression and web-optimized file types a must.

Regardless of their quality, make sure the images match your brand and present the most attractive sides to your physical product.

Here are my five tips if you want to learn to code:

Don’t Use an Online “Coding Academy”

While websites such as Codecademy receive a lot of good press, I believe they miss the bigger picture. Online courses such as these will teach you syntax (how to declare a variable) but they, in my opinion, do not show you how everything works within the context of the entire application. I once finished a Ruby course on Codecademy, and by the end knew how to write an IF,THEN statement, but still had no idea how to actually build a web application and get that IF,THEN statement to run inside the application.

Instead, I’d recommend courses that focus on how to build entire function applications rather than learning specific languages. Sites such as One Month and Code4Startup can help you out in these areas. If you really want to get your hands dirty, Michael Hartl’s Ruby on Rails Tutorial will not only provide you with a strong foundation on how to build an application, but teach you basic programming fundamentals. It took me almost three months to get through the entire tutorial, but it was well worth the time invested.

Work Through Your Failures

Learning to code is hard. There is no way around that. The initial learning curve is steep. The best way to learn is to run into issues and work through them — do not cheat! One of the drawbacks of a site like Codecademy is that if you can’t work your way through a problem, you can just click to see the answer. While this may help you move onto the next step, you often won’t understand what you did wrong. And if you do, you likely won’t remember it.

There is a precipitous learning curve in coding. But I guarantee, if you stick with it long enough, there will come a point when it starts to click. Having the discipline to work through problems will force your mind to remember what you did wrong the next time you run into the same issue. For me, learning to code was similar to learning calculus. At first, I swore it was random madness and nothing made sense. But eventually, I started to realize there was a method to the madness, and moving forward, it made things much easier.

Start With the Basics: HTML, CSS and Some Javascript

Having a deep knowledge of how HTML, CSS and Javascript work will get you pretty far, even if you haven’t yet learned any back-end languages such as PHP or Ruby. HTML and CSS are what are known as the “front end.” Technically, they aren’t even development languages, but you can still accomplish a lot with them. Having this front end knowledge will equip you with the tools to build a prototype, stand up a website, or just play around with an idea you may have. I suggest learning Bootstrap, which is a front-end framework.

Have a Reason

Many people want to learn to code simply for the sake of learning to code. Avoid this. Having a personal project you want to complete will keep you motivated when you are so frustrated you just want to jump off a cliff. It also provides a completion point and a medium to test and apply your new skills rather than just learning for sport.

Don’t Give Up

Like anything in life, this sounds like a given but it’s true. If you’re frustrated, take a step back, do something else for a while, and come back to it. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve banged my head against the wall trying to figure out an issue, only to come back a few hours later and figure out the answer in minutes. It is always too early to give up.

If you’re planning to have a career in the tech space, knowing how to code will work wonders in any capacity. Admittedly, learning to code is hard and there are no shortcuts, which is why there are not enough developers. But are there any shortcuts to places worth going? Stick with it. It’ll be worth it — I promise.

But what does it mean to be mobile-friendly? There are two choices: native mobile apps or the mobile web. Native mobile applications have a host of advantages compared to the mobile web: access to the device’s hardware, easy push notifications, and better performance. But, when I chose my company’s mobile strategy, we went all in on the web. Here’s why we made that choice, which might get you thinking about whether your business really needs a mobile app.

If we were to ask users to install an app, there would have to be a very good reason. Good reasons include a genuine need for access to on-device features like the camera or accelerometer, or a requirement for graphical capabilities available only to native applications.

If the functionality of benefit to the user can’t be implemented on the web, you have a good reason to create a mobile app. Let me stress “of benefit to the user.” If the only benefit is to your company, then it’s a little rude to nag a user into installing an app on their phone.

Here’s the thing: Almost everything that the majority of businesses want to do with an app is possible on the modern mobile web. Modern front-end and back-end web technology, when coupled with responsive design techniques, give us everything we need to create a powerful experience for our users, regardless of the device they use.

My company’s clients come to us via the web. If we created an app, there’s no chance that we would get new business through an app store. The web is how our clients find us, and the web is where they want to do business with us. That’s not true of just my business — it’s true of most businesses with a presence on the web.

We’d be imposing on our clients if we asked them to move from their preferred platform to a native application. Furthermore, a native app could never replace our site. We’d need to develop apps for several platforms in parallel with a mobile-friendly website. Managing multiple code bases, all of which would have to be integrated with our back-end ordering systems and control panels, would involve a huge duplication of effort with no tangible upside.

Most people do not want to install yet another mobile application that does exactly what a business’ website does. I know I don’t. Some companies cripple their web experience with annoying ads and limited functionality to encourage uptake of an app that users don’t want or need. We respect our clients and the choices they make — why would we treat them like that?

We thought a lot about developing native applications, and we decided it wasn’t worth the investment for us or our clients. Instead, we have focused on creating a compelling and elegant mobile experience on the web.

When deciding on a mobile strategy, founders and leaders should consider the following:

• Is the complexity of creating and managing — or paying someone else to create and manage — multiple code bases worth the specific benefits a native application can provide?
• Would a native application provide a unique and original experience, or would you simply replicate the functionality of a website?
• Would you be better served creating the best possible mobile web experience?
• How do your users find you? Is a native app likely to generate more revenue than a mobile-optimized site?

The mobile web is open, it’s universal, and it’s come a long way in the last few years. A couple of years ago I’d have recommended a native app to most businesses because the mobile web wasn’t ready for prime time. That’s no longer the case. Entrepreneurs should think long and hard about whether a native app is the right way to go.

With a background in successfully marketing lifestyle companies in interesting and consumable ways, I have spent the last year using my experience to make distributed technology as palatable as a new beachside restaurant. Working with companies trailblazing into industries that have never even heard of blockchain, I’ve quickly learned the best and worst ways to go about marketing for distributed technologies.

The Problem

The average Joe has a pretty tough time wrapping his head around any new technology, but for something as foreign as blockchain, this learning curve gains another few degrees of steepness. Before blockchain can truly change the way the world operates, it needs to become part of our common language, like the internet did in the 1990s. The confusion over the benefits blockchain brings, its relation to Bitcoin, and the jargon attached to it are all issues that are currently plaguing the space.

How Blockchain Companies Can Make Themselves Known

6. Leave out the jargon. When people discuss developments related to the internet, it’s typically about services like Facebook and email. That’s why the average Joe won’t care about the technical infrastructure or protocol layers of your technology. Throw away your clever words, and communicate your company’s essential value in the most simple and clear way possible.
7. Differentiate yourself from the black market. Often synonymized with the occasionally misbehaving Bitcoin, blockchain companies need to assert themselves as the harborers of everything good (and legal). Take a good, hard look at your marketplace — from your direct competitors and potential business partners to the reporters who cover them. You could use TalkWalker Alerts to track the positive (and negative) coverage of these companies and ideas, and brainstorm how to recycle this feedback positively into your strategy. Form relationships with reporters speaking positively about the space, and help educate those still harboring skepticism.
8. Take advantage of speaking opportunities. Some of the most innovative blockchain companies I’ve seen are either too shy, or think they’re too busy to utilize the wealth of speaking opportunities at their disposal. Regularly research conferences, panels and events happening in your industry and participate in them. Also, don’t be afraid to suggest and create events and speaking engagements of your own, as these will allow you to have more control over the conversation. Recent media hype around blockchain gives you a unique privilege when pitching for these opportunities, and being seen amongst your industry peers and the press alike is essential to becoming a thought leader.
9. Establish a voice through content marketing. Along with speaking engagements, regularly posting content on industry topics is essential to establishing yourself as a thought leader. It helps increase traffic to your website, which can translate to lead generation through “call to action” links in your articles. You could even use a tool like SimilarWeb to discover publications and blogs with the best traffic, and pitch byline opportunities for them.
10. Establish a web presence. Use keywords, key publications and contacts to unlock the benefits of search engine optimization. I’ve worked with companies where just a couple of tactical blog mentions and posts thrust them from eight pages deep in Google search results to the very top. Ensure backlinks to your website take people to the kind of landing page they’ll be excited to look at. Although high-quality websites are typically not a pain point for the tech-focused blockchain company, you must ensure that your website backs up the innovation of your business model.
11. Throw a party. Make a splash by hosting a fabulous event or throwing an unforgettable party to celebrate your company’s launch, anniversary, or major milestone. Accompany this with video, photographers, demos and cutting-edge vendors to maximize the appeal of the event. By becoming the talk of the town, you’ll attract the interest of prospective employees and reporters alike. And in the media age, going viral is the holy grail of marketing.

Our website was our greatest chance of communicating that branded message to our audience, and we recognized early on that it would be our biggest asset. So that is exactly where we started, and where we put our focus in our early years.

This article, however, isn’t meant to share all of the successes and failures of our early years. It’s to talk about a question I get from friends and entrepreneurs, which is usually posed like this: “Your business is established, and you already have a pretty good website, why do you keep changing it?” Here’s why we do it, and why we think you should too.

Building a New Website Improves How You Do Business

A website should be the full digital representation of a company and its offerings. So, going through the process of creating a new website is the best opportunity for a company to analyze everything it’s doing. When we go through a redesign, we ask a series of questions about the brand:

• Does our brand identity match who we are today?
• Does the voice of my business accurately reflect our culture and values?
• What makes us different?
• Do we actually do the things we say we do?
• Why do our clients choose to work with us?

I could rattle off a million more, but as you can probably tell, none of these questions have to do with technical details. They’re business questions we need to have good answers for, and if we don’t, well, now’s the time to answer them.

Every time we go through a website redesign, the answers to these questions either change or mature. It keeps us in check with the growth of our company and how it’s evolving and allows us to communicate the most accurate depiction of ourselves to the outside world. Overall, we use it as the catalyst to drive ourselves forward. Whether or not the change is dramatic, there’s always room for improvement within our company.

We often find the answers have a ripple effect in how we do things in the organization. For example, we might find our needs have changed, but our processes haven’t caught up. That could affect how we communicate in our pitches, how we set the tone for company culture, and how internal communications are handled.

It Pushes Your Employees (In a Good Way)

Yes, predictability is comfortable. But it can also be extremely boring. We use our redesigns as an opportunity to break people out of their daily routine. Activities like fast-paced brainstorming sessions or full internal work days get people excited. It also gives our team an opportunity to show off what they can do, or figure out things they can’t.

We conduct these open sessions with a flat management approach. By giving everyone the same level of importance and say in the project, we get a more diversified outlook on our brand. Employees are often capable of doing more than what’s in their job description or what’s expected of them. We’ve had plenty of opportunities where employees have shown their leadership capabilities or revealed a new skill we never knew they had. As you can imagine, these types of revelations are not only beneficial to the project at hand, but extremely valuable to the company overall.

It’s Our Biggest Sales Tool (And Probably Yours, Too)

Our website has always been a direct reflection of what we’re capable of. This stems back from what I said at the beginning of this article. We didn’t have any clients or connections, so our only way to show people what we were capable of was through our website. Having a tangible example of our creative and technical prowess was what allowed us to win our early accounts.

Today, we continue to push our site with that mentality. Every year our team grows, learns new things, and gets better, and we make sure our website is a constant reflection of that. That, in and of itself, opens more doors for us.

If you don’t sell creative services (and I’m assuming the majority of you don’t), there are other ways you can improve your opportunities for sales through your site.

From a general content perspective, you’ll get a clearer message of what it is you do and what makes you unique. You’ll constantly be providing your most up-to-date product or service offerings information and finding opportunities to highlight key initiatives your company has been a part of.

Getting more specific with data is where you can really uncover new opportunities. Look into tools like Google Analytics, Lead Forensics and Hotjar to really understand who your audience is and how they behave. You’ll be able to discover more about the information they need at key points.

In Conclusion

Redoing our website is the catalyst of change in our organization. It helps us innovate and improve our company in various ways, from sales, to operations, to company culture. Much of this has to do with our focus on the bigger picture in terms of what a website represents, rather than looking at it as a lump of code. Leverage your redesign process as an opportunity to invigorate your business.

A version of this article originally appeared on the author’s company blog.

Having personally gone through this process and having 20 years of experience in the online marketing space, I know what it takes to create a new site from scratch and scale it into something pretty amazing.

If you want to create a successful website or blog on the internet today, you need to do more than just “follow your passion” or “create great content.” Passion and content are still a huge part of the process, but without the necessary pre-planning, outreach and monetization in place, your site will just be another lost in the mix.

Here are three expert guides to help maximize your blogging efforts:

“How to Start a Niche Blog (And Why You Should)” by Julie Neidlinger

Before even starting a new website or blog, you need to know why you are creating one, who it’s for and how you are going to provide value to your audience. All of these are important decisions, as you’ll be going up against potentially hundreds of thousands of sites within your selected niche. Another important part of the pre-planning process is finding the right niche for your site. If you go too wide-scale, you’ll have a hard time focusing on the right content and hitting your exact target audience. By zoning in on your exact target audience and knowing what they’re looking for, you can create better content, provide more value and eventually become the authority within your space.

“7 Proven Strategies to Increase Your Blog’s Traffic by 206%” by Neil Patel

Getting traffic to a blog is something many site owners and content creators struggle with. The general concept of “traffic” is quite misleading in itself, as the value of a visitor can vary heavily based on their interest in your site and how they are going to use it. Focus on your niche when trying to increase traffic back to your blog. When creating content for your site, keep articles extremely focused and use long-tail keywords so you attract the specific audience searching for that solution in Google. It’s also important to utilize other traffic sources like guest blogging, social media and infographics for pulling in visitors from other locations.

“How To Make Money Blogging: Lessons from 23 Successful Bloggers” by Authority Hacker

There are many different ways to make money with a website or blog (some of which I outline in this article), but knowing your exact audience and their needs is crucial to maximizing your site’s earnings. By keeping your site as niche-focused as possible, not only will your content provide more value, but your site’s advertisements will too. The most common and effective ways to start monetizing a blog are through Google AdSense, banner advertising and affiliate marketing. Once a blog has enough traffic and authority, it can also start selling its own CPM-based direct advertising, products and services at a premium rate. Not only does this reference guide cover everything mentioned above, it also goes into fine detail on how top bloggers are making money with their sites through content creation, custom services and testing different monetization methods.

As mentioned earlier, starting a blog is one of the easiest things you can do online. All it takes is a domain name, web hosting and a quick install of WordPress. Once all of this is in place, you can start publishing content right to your site. But this is where most site owners stop. If you want to find success with blogging, you need to realize it’s not going to happen overnight. Treat your blog like a business, follow each of the expert guides above, and soon enough, you might just have a high-traffic, revenue-generating blog of your own.