Homepage Design Tips
So if "every page is a homepage," then what should you have on your home page?
by Dave Maloney
An awful lot of businesses want to cram everything about their company into their home page layout, from every product or service they offer, every accreditation they've ever received, company history, some testimonials from last century, etc, etc. Unfortunately, with the intentions of making everything easy to find all in one place, the result is their visitors can't find what they're looking for, and may abandon your site altogether.
Your home page is not any more important than any other page within your site. With search engines and SEO, your home page is not the only way visitors can enter your site; they can go directly to the product or service page of yours that shows up in their search results without ever passing through your home page. If visitors are having trouble finding what they're looking for on your site, the problem most likely has to do with your page navigation. Reorganizing your site structure will more likely fix the problem than trying to add more-bigger-bolder-louder-starbursts to compete for attention in your homepage design.
Here's a few quick guidelines for your home page design:
- Most importantly, keep your homepage layout short and simple. Can you see the footer of your page without having to scroll down? Anything on that page that can't be seen without scrolling is termed "below the fold" (think of a folded newspaper) and probably won't get seen at all. People skim; so if you have a ton of text, break it up and have a link to another page (or pages) where the specific topic can continue on its own page.
- Having one or more images is crucial to the "life" of your home page design; all-words is pretty dull. Try to use images and colors that are consistent with your brand and portray your business properly, while being of interest to your ideal audience. Understandably, finding relevant images is more difficult for some businesses than others, but that clipart photo of the group of professionals sitting around the conference room table pretending to take notes is not adding anything. Again, see #1: don't overdo, too much scrolling down to get to anything and you've lost someone already.
- Don't get stale - keep your homepage updated with current stuff! Have a feed that displays your most recent blog articles or newsroom releases, have links to a new product coming out, your latest tweets or your recently-added photo gallery. Of course promote a special offer and/or offers, just keep in mind if the same offers have been there since the site went live 2 years ago, they're not special anymore and could use some re-packaging. If your content is outdated, not only will current visitors stop looking, but new visitors won't stick around long and won't be back either.
If you're still sure what to do with your home page design, look at other sites you like. Make note of what makes their site so easy to get around, and appealing enough to keep you coming back. And instead of thinking "that won't work for my business", try to figure out "How can I make something similar to this work for me?"
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