We spent last weekend at the Work at Home Business Expo in sunny Del Mar, CA helping small businesses learn how to get more power out of their email and social media marketing. While there we had the chance to listen to the crew from GoDaddy.com present Get Your Website Online in 5 Easy Steps. It was a fun and informative presentation filled with plenty of Star Wars references.  Aside from advice from Yoda, we wanted to share what we learned about the four essential pages you need when creating your website:

Homepage – Your homepage is the first page someone sees when they visit your site. In mere seconds a visitor should know exactly who you are and what you do. According to the Neilsen Norman Group, the average webpage visit lasts less than a minute. And, visitors often leave in just 10-20 seconds so you don’t have much time to get your point across. This is not the place to be wordy. Keep it short, concise and to the point and use visuals wherever possible, because a picture is worth a thousand words.

Also, make sure you have a very clear Call to Action on your homepage. In simple terms , a call to action tells the visitor what you want them to do such as Sign Up, Donate, Learn More, Subscribe.

About Us – Next up is your About Us page. This is where you tell your visitors more about your business because before they buy from you, most people want to learn about how long you’ve been in business, your background, your success, etc. This is the place to tell the short story of how your business came to be. Stories resonate and connect you to your audience. You can also super-charge your About Us page by bragging about your business. But let others have the bragging rights by using customer testimonials and quotes to accomplish this. Get more great tips for your About Us (aka Company Profile page) here.

Services – This is the section where you tell visitors about the products or services you offer. If  you have a restaurant, this section would likely be your menu. This page can be a single page, or a page that links off to several subpages depending on the depth of your product or service offering.

Contact Us – Lastly, this page tells visitors how to contact you. If you’re a coffee house, you probably just want to include information like your address and telephone number because you want people to come to your physical location. You can also include links to connect with your business on social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram here. And, of course, include an opt-in form so you can collect email addresses from all those visitors so you can send them news, how-tos and special offers.

By creating great content to include in these four pages, you’ll get your website off to a great start and can add more pages as needed.

What other pages do you find essential for your website?

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