The most common mistake when building a site is adding pages first. People build a ten-item menu and then stall, unsure what to write on each page. Thinking in terms of questions rather than pages is much faster.
A first-time visitor generally asks five things. Five pages answer one question each.
Five questions, five pages
The home page answers “what is this” in one sentence. If that answer is missing from the first screen, nothing else gets read. Avoid industry jargon and use words in which a customer can recognise their own problem.
The service page answers “how do you do it”: scope, process, price. Writing what is not included at the same weight dramatically reduces later disputes.
A case or process page answers “can I trust you”. If you cannot name clients, show how you work instead — a concrete procedure builds more trust than a list of logos.
The about page answers “who are you”. Not a company timeline, but why you do this work and what experience stands behind it.
Contact answers “how do I reach you”. One form and a contact method is enough; keep the fields minimal.
Policy pages are separate
Beyond those five you need a privacy policy and terms. These are not content but a legal requirement, mandatory once you take payments or collect personal data. The convention is to link them in the footer and keep them out of search.
Write first, design second
Reverse the order and you build twice. Design first means squeezing or padding copy to fit a frame, and what you actually wanted to say does not survive. Writing the copy and then building the frame around it is always faster.
Designing page structure from a search perspective is covered further in the SEO archive, and you are welcome to read our own program page as a worked example of a service page.
Next part
With pages in place, it is time to tell search engines. The next part covers registration and confirming your first indexed pages.