9 Best Practises for your website home page
Your home page is often the first point of call for users searching for possible solutions to their challenges. Think of it as your company’s online equivalent to a business card and a significant part of the face your brand presents to your target market and the world beyond. According to the Nielsen Norman Group, “the homepage is the most important page on most websites and gets more views than any other page.”
This is the point at which you invite your visitor to start a conversation with your brand in order to get to know your company, which can then be followed by directing them deeper to the relevant website page which provides more in-depth information before they get in touch with your company.
The 9 Best Practices for your website home page are as follows:
- Content Accessibility: Make it easy for users to go deeper into your site by having links to your other pages such as your ‘about’, ‘contact’ and ‘services’ pages. This can be achieved by tab links in your header menu and footer, together with additional links in the body of the home page through content and images which have calls to action to further optimise reader engagement.
- Your offering: Ideally, your homepage should provide an overview of your business, communicating your services and offerings, highlighting your USP which differentiates you from your competitors
- Look and Feel: Design plays a significant role, using colour and images to guide your user’s experience while further creating a perception of your brand through images and visuals. Use a design that is simple, yet captivating – something that will invite your visitor to take a closer look and engage with your content.
- A hint of what’s to come: Use content which shows your understanding of your visitor’s challenges and then provides an overview of possible solutions, serves as a teaser to entice your reader to click on your services or about tab and read further.
- Bare necessities: Avoid making it too lengthy by going into too much detail about all of your features and benefits (this can be covered in your services and products page).
- Short n Sweet: Keep your word count between 300 – 350 words which focuses on what your company offers, for whom you cater and how you can resolve their challenges.
- Invite a response: Calls to action encourage users to move beyond passivity, facilitating active engagement with the page. While the primary call to action can be placed at the top of the page, it is a good idea to have a secondary call to action at the bottom of the page to foster further lead generation opportunities.
- Simplify reading: Use headings and sub-headings to guide your visitor on his journey of accumulating the necessary information from your page.
- Resources: Leads can be further generated by offering valuable content in the form of an ebook or whitepaper.
Your homepage is important in establishing a rapport with your user and by using it effectively you can position it as a resource which provides information to create the foundation for a relationship and establish credibility of your company.