How to layout a website is our Day 4 of learning WordPress fast. Setting out a website design is more than just pretty pictures, it also means aspects like Information Architecture, or IA for short. IA is the internal layout of your site and how you, the user or a search engine will crawl through it.

Today we are going to look at a bit of this and a bit of the visual stuff. If you have not seen yesterdays, we talked about how to choose a WordPress theme, check it out if you are lagging behind.

How to layout a website is a little art, and a little bit of sense, but it is 1 great way to avoid bad day ahead if you plan on making this your side hustle.

How to layout a website from the inside

So let’s start with IA. A lot of websites start with a template and we all work backwards. This means we try to fit our business and our needs into pre-existing pages. Who even say’s you need a contact page called contact?

Get a pen and paper or a whiteboard for this.

If you have a page that say’s call us, then it’s no different. So what I want you to do first, is think about what words you want to target on Google. Realistically.

If you are going to do a dog walking business, then let’s think:

• Dog Walking
• Dog Sitting
• Dog Minding
• Dog Grooming
• Doggy Day Care

Then from these words ill be phrases that branch off.

• Dog Walking near me
• Dog Walking London
• How to find a dog minder
• What makes a good dog walker
• What should I look for in a dog walker

And so on.

So you have some seed words – these are the top of the list phrases, and you will create a list of words that support each seed word. These secondary terms will be supporting blog posts or similar. But more on that at a later time.

For now, you know what pages you need at the top of your site.

Your services are your keywords. BUT KNOW THIS….

Sometimes, what we call our services, is not always what our customers call them. There are a few useful tools for finding those out there, or you can use our telephone consultation service, that helps you identify them, while we are on the phone.

What is the right structure of the site?

Getting the order of importance, or hierarchy of your site is critical. Having similar topics discussed on other sides of your site, under a blog for example that doesn’t link back to the main page you want to rank for a term, cannibalises the power you could have had.

A common way to build the site is to start with your seed words as top-level pages and then the smaller topics are sub-pages of that one. Then if you do mention the terms you want to rank a more senior page for, you can always link back up to that page. Plus Google will see the order of structure in the page domain names too. We call this an SEO Silo.

How do I layout the site visually

As part of this tutorial on how to layout a website, we are using Elementor Pro and today’s video really gives you the chance to see what it can do. That said, I am only showing you the very basics so far.

So let’s get into the video for Day 4 and you can see what needs to be done to turn your theme into the makings of an online presence.