It should make your visitors want to do business with you
You may not have thought much about it, but your counting on your homepage has to do a lot for you. And given the impatience of most Internet users, it has very little time in which to accomplish its mission.
Here’s what you should expect your homepage to do for your company:
- Embody Your Brand
- Orient Your Guests
- Explain Your Value Proposition
- Highlight Your Offerings
- Inspire Action
Embody Your Brand
More than just your logo and color scheme, your brand is defined by the experience that customers have working with you.
Website visitors that are new to your company will assume that their experience on your homepage represents how it would be like to work with you.Is it easy to use and understand, concise, inviting, helpful? Does it make you look professional, experienced and savvy?
Make sure your homepage embodies all aspects of your brand and what its like working with your company.
Orient Your Guests
Through its design and page contents, your homepage should quickly let visitors know that they are in the right place; that they have found the company, product or service that they are seeking.
Furthermore, your homepage should help visitors orient themselves by focusing their attention on the most important elements. A homepage that attempts to give prominence to every element actually gives prominence to none, distracting and confusing guests instead.
Design a homepage layout helps visitors find what they are looking for.
Explain Your Value Proposition
Visitors to your homepage should be able to quickly understand what makes your company special, how you are different from your competition, and why they should choose to to business with you. They should not have to read a paragraph to get this understanding.
You should have a succinct but powerful value-proposition statement front and center on your homepage. If you don’t have one, this previous post will help you develop one.
Highlight Your Offerings
Whether is a list of our key services, depictions of your featured products, or announcements for your specials, your homepage should highlight your most significant offerings. Be careful though; just like with page elements, trying to highlight too many offerings will backfire. We’re not talking about comprehensive lists here.
Determine the three to five (hopefully three) items that your visitors will find most appealing, and highlight those in a way that assures they are noticed but doesn’t disrupt the balanced focus of your page layout.
Inspire Action
Once your guests have determined what they want to do – whether investigate a product, signup for a newsletter, or anything else – your homepage has to help them take the next step. Encourage them to take action, actually.
Through well-designed navigation, clear call-to-action graphics, and thoughtfully placed buttons you can make sure you don’t lose an interested visitor because they’re not sure how to proceed.
Actually, there’s even more to a great homepage design, but if your homepage succeeds on the objectives above, it is doing well by your company.
