The homepage of your website is the page that decides whether visitors to your site explore your content or get bored and leave. It is the most important page of your website, and the web page design characteristic must be displayed in a very professional manner on this page.
From establishing trust and credibility to communicating what the site is all about and who owns it, the homepage has various roles to play in the webpage visitor-website owner dynamic. Most importantly, the homepage must convince the visitors to stay long enough to explore the content.
Here follow four tips to help your web site design grow with your homepage.
1: Welcome your visitors with a positioned statement .
As an introductory page, the homepage should satisfy the questions that crop up in the visitors' minds. One of the commonest of these questions is “What is this website all about?” Answer that question immediately in a paragraph, and make it innovative - a simple “Welcome to-” is not considered a great way to introduce your visitors to your site since it is old and done too many times. Instead, play to your visitors' minds on why they should do business with your company.
2: Emphasise important content and write-ups with priority links.
The homepage of your site should never be a sitemap - it should not treat all its pages equally. On an average, for an online business, only a few pages are important as they have maximum traffic coming to them. Use web design skills to make sure these are the pages highlighted in your homepage and promote them to get even more hits. These pages are usually those of the bestseller product or service.
Feature linking or priority linking is like a prominent signboard that directs visitors to that page with the best content written about it in a précis form or a one-line shortcut.
In essence, these are three ways by which you can see how to promote pages:
Web analytics software helps to find which the most important feature pages are.
Reviewing sales figures establishes which the bestselling products are.
Selecting the best pages editorially.
3: Deliver the newest items on the homepage .
Your users would like to know what the latest happenings in your site are - give it to them right on the homepage! This can be either a new article, new product or some good review online of your website or product. This can also be a place to highlight your new promotional sales, online advertising or other important business-oriented news. It need not be very long - a few sentences with well placed links are more than enough.
4: Group business information .
A section should be devoted to your company's business information such as stock quotes, mission statement, job vacancies and press releases.
Keep your site fresh and keep up to date with your web site optimisation plan.