The Anatomy of a Website

The web design projects we focus on at MCS are for the self employed and small business in Maidenhead who need a small website to tell prospective visitors about their company and services. Although every website looks different and unique there are standard features to all sites which I will explain in more detail. This will help you with coming up with your own design ideas of how you want your website to look. It will also help you with making changes by yourself which is something we offer to all our customers.

Page structure

Every page has 4 parts:

Header - The header stays uniform throughout your website and is part of your brand.

Menu - A menu helps to make it easy for visitors to navigate your website and see what you have to offer.

Main content -This is where you provide information on what your company is about.

Footer - Like the header, the footer stays constant throughout your website. It's a useful place to put contact details, social media links and other useful links.

 

Standard Set of Pages

Almost every website has the following pages although there's no rules that they have to have them all.

Homepage - the page everyone sees when they go to your domain.

About - a page outlining who you are and what you do and why you do it really helps prospective visitors learn more about you and gain trust in who they will be dealing with.

Contact - You want to make it easy as possible for people to contact you. Including your telephone number and email address and having a simple contact form are essential. You might also want to consider having live chat facility

Services offered - If you are a service oriented business then details about all your services should be written. If you offer lots of services then you should write a separate page for each service. The more detail, the better. This not only helps your visitors really understand what you have to offer it also helps Google understand your business and thus rank you higher in the search results.

WordPress Features

Themes

Themes control how your website looks. There are thousands of themes, from free ones to paid for ones. We like Astra and and Generate Press themes as they are keep things simple and are continually kept up to date.

Plugins

Plugins are like apps on your smartphone. Just like you add apps to your phone such as games, weather apps, social media apps etc there are also thousands of plugins for WordPress which increase its functionality. Two of our favourites is WP Forms which enables you to create contact forms and Envira which enables you to showcase photos.

Great Photos

Great photos are essential for your website. As they say a picture paints a thousand words. There are websites which offer free excellent quality photos for commercial use. Read our blog post on how to get great quality free photos for your website. Browse these websitesphotos yourself to find photos that match the design ideas for your website.