When visitors arrive at your site, you want them to understand intuitively how your site is put together. So make your insurance agency website easy to navigate. Divide the material on your site into easily organized chunks: About us, Our Services, Get a Quote, Service Center, Newsletters, Our Blog, Contact Us. Use titles like these for each section in your navigation bar, with pull down menus that further define the content in each group.
Make sure your website has a consistent look throughout. Font styles, headers, graphic images, sidebars and footers should have the same look from page to page. But don’t crowd your page with lots of busy graphics and dense text. Let the pages breathe with plenty of white space. Limit your choice of font families to one or two. These style choices will make reading you website easier, more coherent and help create a more professional image.
Simple layout and design choices will help people to find their way around your page. The basic layout of a website is a header with a navigation bar under it, a sidebar to the left or right (or maybe both), the main content area in the middle and a footer at the bottom of the page. The diagram below illustrates the basic architecture of most websites:
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Header |
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Navigation Bar |
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Left Sidebar |
Main Body |
Right Sidebar |
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Footer |
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Surprisingly, there is a lot you can do with a basic layout like this. The header contains the name of your agency and main contact information. The navigation bar displays links to other key content pages. Sidebars may contain quote buttons, your newsletter sign-up button, Facebook and other social media buttons or interfaces, and pull-quotes from testimonials or links to other popular pages on your site. The main, middle body of the page is for the target content of the page, such as policy descriptions, profiles of your key people, your newsletters, your blog, etc. The footer might contain a smorgasbord of icons of companies you represent or links to legal material like your privacy policy statement.
Build your website with a platform that makes it easy for you to change content yourself. WordPress is one of the easiest platforms to use. It’s the favorite choice of most bloggers. But it’s also a great platform for content management systems, which is why at SmartsPro Marketing we have chosen it as the platform for the insurance agency websites we build and host. We feel it’s important that agents be able to make ongoing changes to their content without having to call their developer whenever they add a new person to their staff profiles or want to feature a new product on their home page. WordPress is also search engine-friendly, well supported with thousands of open source plug-ins that can make your website more functional and it loads quickly.
For more advice on starting up or improving your insurance agency website — or if you would like to learn more about SmartsPro Websites for insurance agents — please contact me.
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