OK – there isn’t one perfect home page! It depends on your business and the purpose of your website. However, there are some key dos and don’ts that apply to most websites.
1: People need to get what’s on offer quickly – that means that your banner and your headline need to work hard for their place on your prime real estate. When people see the image and the headline do they immediately think “Yes, that’s what I’m looking for.” Or do they have to scroll down to find out if you’ve got what they are hoping to find?
2: Every headline must grab the reader’s attention. So, they need to be focused on your visitors pain and gain. The message should feature the problems your reader is suffering from and/or what life will be like with their problems fixed. Writing compelling headlines is an art that takes hard work to get right.
3: Your introduction should be short, reader-focused and tell people how to get what they want.
4: Show your visitor what’s on offer and make it easy to get to more information. If you have three or four core offerings, provide a one line summary and a big fat clickable button or box. This is especially important for mobile users as clicking a piece of highlighted text is often literally a hit or miss experience.
5: Don’t forget a call to action. Tell people what to do – and make it easy for them to do it. If you don’t ask them to do something, there is a surprisingly large percentage who will simply do nothing!
6: Make sure that there are great images – but they must be included for a good reason – not just because you need to liven the page up with some visuals. Ideally, where text and images are alongside each other the text goes to the left and the image to the right. If in columns or boxes – image at the top, text underneath OR headline, image, text from top to bottom.
7: When you’ve added all the key important information to allow people to get what they want quickly, maybe add a link and image to your About page and the most recent blog articles, or other information you want people to look at.
Then TEST
Think about what you want people to do when they visit your website. Now give the test home page to half a dozen existing or potential customers with a list of what you want them to do and ask them for feedback on how easy they found it. E.g. Find out how to purchase green widgets or find out what sort of service packages are available.
This is invaluable as it allows you to ‘see’ your website from the user’s perspective. Don’t fall into the trap of asking your friends and family to test your site – they’ll either love it (because they love you) or be unnecessarily critical. If they’re not your ideal client, they won’t have the right objectives.
