A 404 Not Found page on Technorati reads as “Sorry! We have a zillion pages, but not that one”. Thats nice text for a not found page. But, your users wouldn’t like to see it when trying to access few important pages. What are those pages ? Lets see…
1) Contact Me
The contact page is the most important page of any blog. I do have a Contact page here and all bloggers who are serious about blogging have one. It not only helps your readers interact with you, but they also let you know of any errors that might pop up on your site. You don’t have one & don’t know how to make one ? Never worry. Kontactr is a service that i created, to make contact forms easier. It takes less than 30 seconds to setup your contact form (that depends on your Internet speed though :-P).
2) About Me
This is something that would make your blog more personal. It is also a part of personal branding. When they users get to know about you, they become more loyal to you. Take a look at some about me pages. I know that i don’t have an About Me page here. The reason is that i’m not able to come up with a good one. I will try to put one soon.
3) Advertise Page
If you seriously want to make money online, an Advertise page is a must. I don’t have one as my blog is new and doesn’t have Pagerank yet. I’m expecting PR4 in this update and if it hits, i’ll put up one. Check out John’s or Nate’s advertise pages to know what should be put up in an Advertise page. I do have an Advertise page on my other free webmaster resources website. Does it meet John’s and Nate’s quality ?
4) Search Page
The search feature comes packed with WordPress. But, if you have a Non-blog website, you should really consider getting your own Search facility. I get irritated when i see websites without a search box. You might give Google Co-op a try. Thats works very well.
5) Sitemap
A sitemap is helpful not only for Search engine robots, but, also for human visitors. It helps them find what pages are where. There are lots of sites (even a wordpress plugin) that help you create a sitemap for a robot. But, you should manually gather the links and organize them properly to make a sitemap for humans. Check out these sitemaps of some giants : Google, eBay, Apple.
nice post, but i integrated contact, advertise and about page in one…
Hey Wallace, that looks very nice too.
What about external site links?
Dan, i don’t understand. What do external links have to do with the topic of this post ?
I generally create specialized pages for each advertiser or advertising network. That way I have the reader’s unbroken attention and when I quit representing the advertiser, I don’t have to edit — I simply delete the page (or if I have lots of links pointing to it, I just put in a different advertisement).
Nice idea Dave. But, i don’t think i’ll have the patience to create a special page for each advertiser.
Great post — as always!
Here’s our take to the 6 Must-have pages every website needs
can anyone help me! i want sell my blog http://kucingphotos.blogspot.com/ google pagerank is 3. how to add page about that in blogspot about sitemap? thanks.
Personally, I never read “About me” page and know lots of people who don’t too.
NIce post. Those will surely help other developers to just make the pages which they’ll need,therefore saving more time, effort and memory space.
still my blog is new, i think advertise page is not too important for me,
integrating contact, advertise and about page in one is a good idea.
A good list, I had most of them, except the advertising page. I have some sites where this may make sense to hook up. Thanks!
thank you for your great advices
I see that you have a great advertise page and it seems to work. I like your logo and you did a great job with the theme. Nice work!
I think it is amazing how many sites either don’t have a contact page or make it impossible to find. Apparently they are not interested in user feedback.