What is the Structure and Purpose of your Website?
This week, we deep dive into understanding website structure and purpose. Today, a website is more important than ever as the online space increases in relevance and popularity. A solid online presence helps you stand out from other websites offering similar goods or services, especially when they are all available to the customer at the press of a button. A good website could be the difference between making a sale and losing a customer to a competitor; it also helps build authority for your online presence and brand identity.
Website Purpose
The first decision you need to make when designing your website is the reason for developing the website in the first place. Are you selling a product, offering a service, providing information about your business or something else?
Returning to the website's core value and reason for being active will help you decide how to structure your website. Keeping the structure simple and easy to navigate is critical to a good website. A website is like having a store that is open 24/7. It is convenient for the customer and requires less input from you as an operator than what a conventional storefront offers. .
How often have you wanted to run to Coles or Woolworths on the weekend or a public holiday, yet when you arrive, they're closed? It's frustrating, right?
Similarly, a website allows potential customers to access your content, product or services when it suits their schedule; they don't experience the frustration of having to come back 'during office hours'. On the flip side, you can take advantage of that lead, whether they're a cold, warm or hot lead.
On top of that, the internet is a global resource, meaning your potential customer base can easily extend from your local area to interstate or international markets.
Your website serves as the first point of contact for a customer in most cases and should showcase who you are and what you're doing
The Importance of your homepage:
The home page should clearly show what the customer will find on your website and an easy-to-follow path from the initial landing to the desired outcome. As briefly mentioned above, homepages are one of the first pages Google crawls and looks at when identifying where your website fits in the Google ecosystem.
Suppose you look at Google as a 'world library' of resources and information. In that case, the head librarian likely gets thousands of new publications or ideas submitted daily, so if your website is unclear or incorrectly designed, you will probably be put at the bottom of the pile.
Having a clear objective and idea at the forefront of the design process will make the indexability and readability of your website straightforward and to the point, making it easier for Google to identify what your website is about and what service you're offering.
How should I design my shop's homepage?
For e-commerce home pages, this could mean showcasing a popular product, exclusive product, or current offer. An excellent process to get into when designing your storefront, whether you're working on your first or tenth website, is looking at your design through the lens of your potential client or customer. Each lens can be very different and is usually determined by the industry or niche you're involved in.
What if I'm a Service-based Business?
For service-based pages, this is where you show off what you can do; for example, our home page shows a breakdown of the services we offer right at the top of the page. If you are providing information about your business, you have a few options; for example, a restaurant may have pictures of the food or staff and a blurb about what type of food they make. If you're a tech company, highlight use cases for your product or what niche the product fills.





Building Trust and Credibility
A professional website that is built well also provides opportunities to communicate with your audience. Communication builds trust and adds to your credibility.
As you publish more content on your website, the legitimacy of your knowledge begins to shine through, showing the customer how passionate you are about the product, service or offer you're talking about.
Linking social media pages and customer reviews also improves credibility and acquiring data on customer behaviour, preferences, purchasing habits and traffic patterns. These in-depth analytics help you optimise your content to attract customers better. Experimenting with layout and design features is essential here and where A/B testing can come into play.
As may be evident, purpose directly influences structure in several ways, but keeping some core structure principles in mind will ensure that your website maximises engagement from potential customers.
How to Structure Your Website
The first step is to create a sitemap. A Sitemap will help you visualise how a customer will move through your website. It provides information about the pages and content within your website.
The primary purpose of a sitemap is to help search engines like Google better understand your site's structure and organisation. As a result, indexing and crawling your website is easier and more streamlined for Google. Sitemaps can be in XML format (for search engines) or HTML format (for human visitors) and include details like the URLs of pages, their last modification dates, and their priority within the site.
How do you make a sitemap?
Well, depending on your software, it will likely be autogenerated. SEO tools like Rank Math and Yoast SEO generate a sitemap automatically as you import or create content.
Once you have a sitemap, your SEO and index-ability will improve as the different search engines (Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo) can pull the correct page from their servers. This refers to what we discussed at the top of the article: having a clear and readable structure for your website pages and content will improve your index-ability and ranking in Google.
Design Considerations
Now, on to some core concepts, the first being navigation. Your website needs to be easy to navigate for any user. Each user should be able to make their way through menus that are well organised with everything clearly labelled.
These labels need to be short and describe what customers expect to find when clicking the link. Keep any themes the same throughout the website, such as having the dropdown menu in the same place on every page and having titles uniform across the site.
Content Creation
Organising the content of your website into a hierarchy that makes sense is very important. One way to accomplish this hierarchy is through categorising each piece of content. The most important information, call to action (CTA), and other vital information should be front and centre. The CTA should be what the customer sees first and very obvious.
If you have large blocks of content, break it up with headings, subheadings, pictures, lists or videos. As people lose attention quickly, small breaks and graphics throughout content-heavy paragraphs make it easier on the eyes and help keep readers engaged. If someone is looking for something specific, it also helps them find what they are looking for with minimal frustration. Alternatively, the correct headings can be used in your content table and easily accessible if the user wants something specific. Lastly, ensure you have whitespace (sometimes called negative space). White Space helps to reduce visual clutter and makes it easier to focus on the content.
Responsive pages and posts
How many of you are reading this on a mobile phone? A tablet or even your desktop? Responsive designs need to adapt to multiple screen sizes. Not everyone will view your page on the same device, so make sure your layout works on mobile, tablet and desktop devices. Getting this fundamentally right at the start will lead to faster load times and reduced bounce rates. If your page loads quickly, you will retain more customers. Optimising images for websites, taking advantage of whitespace and deleting unnecessary scripts will all help decrease load times and improve connection speeds.
Next Steps:
The purpose of your website may change as your business grows and develops over time. Researching what works well in your industry and experimenting with different layouts is a process that takes time, and you likely won't get it on the first try, but that's okay. What works for one business may not work for another; it's just a matter of trial and error. But as long as you keep the fundamental concepts of purpose and structure in mind, you'll be making a step in the right direction.
Follow the links below to get started!
We hope you found this article insightful and that you can start making your first professional business website! Be sure to follow us across all our Socials and sign up for our newsletter to receive occasional emails with events, offers and new blogs!
Disclaimer: If you choose to purchase or sign up for any programs or software talked about in this article, a small compensation may be paid out to DPT Total Solutions. This does not come at any extra cost to you. We use these affiliate payments to ensure we can provide you with the best advice and practices to Build, Grow, Optimise and Integrate your business online.