Which pages does a business website really need?

Most page plans grow out of company logic: first the company, then the philosophy, then the history, and the services somewhere in between. Visitors enter from exactly the opposite end. They arrive with a question and work through a short chain: what do you do, who do you do it for, where are you, roughly what does it cost, and what happens next? Build the page plan along that chain and the navigation needs no explanation, because the order explains itself. Reverse it and every visitor is forced to take the detour through the company's self-portrait first.

This is not a question of style but of attention span. Around 93 percent (Federal Statistical Office of Germany, survey on the use of information and communication technologies in households) of people aged ten and over in Germany use the internet, and roughly nine in ten (Bitkom) use a smartphone. First contact with a small business website therefore typically happens on a small display, often on the move, often in the minute between two appointments. A phone has no side column in which the menu quietly stays visible; what appears, in order, is whatever sits at the top of the page plan.

Reversing this order is the most common structural mistake. A menu item called Company with the sub-items Philosophy, Mission and History sits exactly where visitors expect the services. Such pages are not wrong, they are simply in the wrong place: they answer the trust question, and in the chain that comes after the practical one. A simple test helps here. Read your menu items out loud and ask whether a customer would use the same words on the telephone. Wherever the answer is no, there is an insider term in the menu.

The single most important decision in a page plan is this: does every service get its own page, or do all services share one? In the vast majority of cases the answer is its own. Three independent reasons support that. First, nobody searches for services; they search for bathroom renovation, boiler maintenance or an emergency plumber at the weekend — and a page can only answer one question precisely. Second, every service needs its own destination for links: from the menu, from an article, from an advertisement, from an email to a prospect. Third, only a separate page shows which service is actually in demand and which one merely feels important to the owner.

How much text a service page needs cannot be expressed as a single number. In practice a good service page carries between half a screen and a full screen of real substance (project experience): what exactly is done, what explicitly is not, how the process runs, which prerequisites apply, the range the costs move in and who the contact person is. Language is the decisive part. Wording taken from your own professional jargon leaves visitors guessing, and people who guess do not call. How to put words on a page without a marketing team behind you is covered in the article on writing for a small business without an editorial team.

One side effect of splitting pages up is often underestimated. AI assistants also compose their answers from what they can take from a page as a self-contained statement. 50 percent (Bitkom) of internet users in Germany use AI chats at least occasionally instead of a classic search engine. A page that describes exactly one service completely is far better suited to that than a catch-all in which every statement is qualified. What this means for structure and wording is set out in the article on visibility in AI search.

The main menu is the visible form of the page plan. Five to seven items have proven themselves (project experience): enough for the important entry points, few enough to remain graspable on a phone without scrolling. There is no binding norm for this; the limit follows from screen width and from the point at which a list stops being scanned and has to be read. Depth matters just as much: one level below the main menu is enough in a small business. Anyone who needs a third level usually has a sorting problem rather than a space problem.

The second rule concerns labelling. Menu items are not headings for the back office, they are signposts for strangers. Descriptive labels pick up the words customers use themselves. For the same reason Google's documentation recommends writing descriptive link text, because it tells users and search engines something about the destination (Google Search Central), and building addresses from words people understand rather than from numbers and codes (Google Search Central). Both recommendations amount to the same thing: the path to a page should already name its content.

Two additions to the menu have proven useful in practice. First, the most important next step — contact, enquiry or phone call — belongs at the end of the menu as a separate item rather than somewhere in the middle, so that it sits in the same place on every page. Second, the footer needs its own quiet order: mandatory pages, availability, the most important subpages. Whatever has no room in the menu but has to be reachable goes there. How different such menus look in finished websites can be seen in the example websites.

A page plan can be written on a sheet of paper in ten minutes. The following examples are deliberately lean: they show the starting line-up, not the final build. Each line is one page, the indentation marks the level, and the address on the left stands for the path under which the page will later be reachable.

In the trades a sixth menu item is frequently added as soon as staff are being recruited. The sector trains around 346,000 young people (German Confederation of Skilled Crafts), which is 28.7 percent (German Confederation of Skilled Crafts) of all apprentices in Germany, and generates a turnover of roughly 783.2 billion euros (German Confederation of Skilled Crafts). Anyone training or hiring needs one page per vacancy rather than a single Jobs item in which applicants have to search for themselves; what matters there is described in the article on a careers page that attracts skilled staff.

Two patterns stand out in this overview. First, every sector has one page that carries the close and that should therefore be reachable straight from the menu: contact in the trades, reservations in hospitality, consulting hours in a practice, the initial consultation in a law firm, joining in a club. Second, the page that is missing most often is the same kind of page in all five cases: the one that answers an uncomfortable question — cost, waiting time, cover, membership fee. That page frequently decides whether someone picks up the phone or keeps looking.

The work in a page plan rarely lies in the thinking but in the setting up: creating pages, naming them, filing them into the menu, linking them to each other, assigning addresses, adding them to the footer — and repeating all of that for every new service. That is exactly where the work stalls in small businesses, because it finds no room between a quotation and a building site. XICflow takes that part off your hands.

How that sequence runs from briefing to published website is described on the page how XICflow works; which building blocks are available is shown in the feature overview. What such a build costs is set out on the pricing page, and how it compares with other routes to a website of your own is explained in the comparison of the options.