Too Many Pages

Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.

If you don’t hear anything else from this article, start simple and stay simple.

I want to first pose a challenge to you:

You only have seven pages to get your points across. All seven pages will be in your main navigation. What are those pages?

List your main seven pages

Go ahead and write them out. And make sure to leave some space under each one. I went ahead and did mine:

Define each page’s action

Now that we have the list of pages that are key, let’s answer: what is the main action (CTA – or call to action) I want people to take when visiting this page? Knowing the one thing you want any visitor to do when visiting each page will help you craft the page’s content.

For me, the primary CTA across all these main pages would be to schedule a call. If you are in the services business, I highly recommend having a scheduler as your primary CTA across your site.

What topics should be discussed on each page?

From here, I want you to now start thinking of what questions a visitor may have when they visit each page. To get your thought process started, here are some questions to consider when thinking about each page. When a user visits this page:

1. What questions would they have?

2. What are they looking to solve?

3. What action are they potentially ready to take?

4. What did they see on my competitor’s websites?

Now that you have all of the topics listed, go through each and ask:

Can I answer this question in a paragraph, or does it deserve it’s own page?

Chances are, you’ll find that you can answer most questions in a single paragraph. I recommend starting there. If you find out that you are answering the same questions from your clients again and again, use that as a push to create subpages that have more in-depth explanations.

You’ll also see some lines being drawn to connect similar sections. In my example above, I have Samples under the Web Design page, but I also have Case Studies under Resources. Those are the exactly same.

The next question I would ask myself is: “Where does it make sense for Case Studies to be stored permanently?” The answer: they are Resources, and therefore should be saved there.

When I’m building my page for Web Design, I would reference Case Studies under Resources.

But what about all my other content?

If you run a website that has hundreds of pages of content, a sitemap that is a bit more robust will assuredly be needed. However, starting simple is never a bad idea.

From here, I recommend going through the other pages that would need to be migrated and do two things:

1. Bucket them together in similar categories

2. Pick which main page each bucket should go under

It is a bit more nuanced than that for larger websites, but that is at least a solid starting point.

What’s next?

Go off and make your website simpler! I dare you to start with pencil and paper – forcing yourself to actually write it out will help keep everything simpler.