How to organize a website when your company offers many services

A company that installs systems, maintains them, and handles breakdowns doesn't have a problem of how many pages to put online. It has a recognition problem: someone arriving because a system has stopped working and someone arriving because they need a new one are in a hurry differently, use different words, and ask different questions. If the website treats them the same way, both have to search, and one of them leaves.

The page map is drawn before the menu, and it follows neither the org chart nor the price list. There's only one rule: a page exists when it answers a question someone actually asks, in their own words. Everything else is material that belongs inside a page, not an extra page.

Take stock first, then build the menu

Before deciding on menu items, you need three lists, written down separately. They take an afternoon to put together, and they almost always show that the current website is organized around a fourth list that no customer knows about: the company's departments.

• The services you sell right now. Not the ones in the old catalog, not the ones you only do for existing customers as a favor. A service you're not trying to sell doesn't need a page competing with the others.
• The audiences, distinguished only by what changes the decision. A technical department and an owner ask the same thing in different words and want different proof: one looks at specifications, the other at production downtime.
• The questions, taken from where they already exist: the first lines of the emails you receive, what people ask on the phone before anything else, the objection the sales team always hears. This is the vocabulary the page titles come from.

Then you cross them: for each audience, which service they're looking for and with what question. Where two cells produce the same answer, it's a single page. Where a cell stays empty, there's no need to invent a page to fill it.

Splitting by service or splitting by industry

This is the choice that decides the structure, and it comes down to a single question: between one case and another, does the work change, or does the customer?

• The work changes: split by service. Installing, maintaining, and repairing call for different skills, timelines, site visits, and payment terms. They're different pages even if the same team does them.
• The customer changes but the work is the same: you can split by industry, but only if you have something specific to say. Same hands, but different constraints, different references, different words.
• Nothing changes: a single page, with a paragraph naming the different cases. One convincing page is worth more than four that look alike.

One main page for each distinct need

Every need requires a single place where the answer is complete: the main page. It's the one you email to a customer asking for information, the one the in-depth content points back to, the one you cite in a quote. If you don't know which of your pages you'd send, that need doesn't have a main page yet.

1. It answers a distinct question, not a rewording of another one.
2. It has its own proof: projects, cases, explanations that apply to that service and not to the others.
3. It stands on its own. Someone can land on it from a search, without having seen the homepage, and understand what it's about.
4. It has someone maintaining it. A page nobody updates is a page that, in a year, will describe things that are no longer true.

If a company essentially sells one thing and the rest is secondary, the right structure is compact: one strong page and a few in-depth pieces. Multiplying pages to look bigger scatters the proof and lengthens the path for someone who just needed to know whether you're the right answer.

The page map of a systems company

A concrete example, with three services coexisting at the same company that can't be treated the same way.

Three main pages, one per need, and two supporting pages that don't close anything but point back. Support is the most different from the others: whoever lands there has a problem in progress, reads little, and is looking for a number. Asking them for ten form fields, the way you would for an installation, means losing them.

Linking without repeating

The risk of a multi-page structure is repetition: service area, certifications, way of working end up on five pages, and changing them becomes archival work. The rule is that each piece of content lives in one place only.

• Cross-cutting content — service area, certifications, team, how a job is carried out — lives on a single page, referenced in a couple of lines wherever needed.
• In-depth pieces point back to the main page, not to each other in a chain. Someone landing on an article should find the selling page at the bottom, not another article.
• The contact option changes shape depending on the page: the phone number for support, a site-visit request for installation, a quote request for maintenance. A single generic form forces the person writing in to re-explain where they came from.

What this guide doesn't cover

This guide takes you as far as the map of commercial pages: services, industries, proof, contact. The editorial organization of content — which articles to write, how they connect to FAQs and service pages, how often they're updated — follows its own logic and is covered elsewhere. Also out of scope is a page built for a single advertising campaign: it doesn't belong to this map, it's built for an ad and judged on that basis.