The importance of a well designed homepage
Experienced users are very demanding.
The more year they’ve been online and the more experience they have with surfing and websites, the less time they will spend on your homepage.
This means that your homepage will have to be ultra clear and to the point. Users will spend most of the 20 to 40 seconds figuring out where to navigate to and scan to possibilities on the homepage.
So basically, you have to relay a very clear message to your visitor:
- What site have they arrived on
- What benifits they will get out of it
- Some information about your site
- And last, how they can use it without thinking to hard
To make matters worse, it doesn’t get any better with returning visitors.
They get to know your site, your navigation, so they know what to do. Once they get on your site, off they go, directly to the navigation and what they are looking for. After all, the meaning of a homepage is to get a visitor to ‘land’ and guide him to the following pages (content).
A couple of tips and pointers to improve your homepage:
- Define your conversion
Before you start designing, define the page conversion activity. What do you want your visitors to do next? Does the site content have ads you want users to click? - Eliminate unneccessary elements
Distraction kills! It’s very tempting to try and cram as much information on a homepage as humanly possible. This often clutters the website and scares people (really it does). - Stay focussed
Remember, you want your visitors to do something. Avoid the urge to promote to many ‘important’ areas of your website. - Important elements above the fold
Place enough (but not to much!) content above the fold to allow your visitors to make a decision about navigating the site. - Eyecandy
Use typography and colours to your advantage. Thoughtfull use of whitespace, font and images to make the site appealing. Avoind putting important stuff in sidebars.
The same advice can be used for a landingpage.
A landingpage is the page a visitor arrives at after clicking a button, banner, ad … That page has but one goal, to convince the visitor to stay and do something. For example filling in a form (newsletter subscription), buy a product (webshop), read your website (plain ad).