Whether you are just starting out or actually taking up the process of redesigning your site, the homepage is one place you want to get right. crucially within the design and final execution that all areas must have been reviewed and designed specifically to work.
The Importance of your homepage is clearly its position of being the first impression on your site. People are quick to judge, and you can’t afford to send customers in the opposite direction.
The homepage is essentially the core of your website, without it, customers and viewers will be unclear or unsure of what your business is about. Nail all these factors into your website, and you’ll certainly be sending business your way.
Make the purpose clear of your business
Keep headlines and titles short, descriptions to the point, imagery needs to be clear and in context to the rest of your content. When designing your homepage, you want to keep at the front of your mind that the customer needs to be informed about your business all the time.
Try to capture your own imagery and not using licensed stock images, or atleast keep images consistent with one another. You can use your pictures and banners to help show the purpose of business you provide much easier, and it ties in well with your text.
You can understand more on imagery here.
Not only is it to show your business purpose to customers, but it also helps categorize your products and services with ease. You section your homepage to showcase what you provide which in return is another way to inform your customers about your company.
Feature your news, blogs and social media
To bring your homepage to life, you can have live feeds and up-to-date sections. You can have social media posts integrated into your design, but more importantly you want news and blogs to be displayed, easy to access.
News or blogs are a great way to keep content fresh and moving. It allows you to keep viewers flowing in on a regular basis, when keeping up with the latest news and trends. Not to mention it’s great at providing your customers with more information and credibility.
If you want to understand how much social media impacts your site, visit our blog here.
Display any testimonials and reviews
Talking of credibility, testimonials will bolster your reliability as a business. It’s an easy, simple section that provides more variety and depth to your homepage. Easy to set up, and simply get thoughts from customers or reviews left on products if you provide them.
Testimonials is just another way to add life to your website, it’s another human thought and attention that’s being respected. The more life you can spring out, the longer attention you’ll receive and hopefully progress across other areas of your site.
Clean and sharp design
Even though we have emphasized the importance of design, you don’t want to spend too much time and thought on the design. Otherwise this can lead to an over the top and more complicated than practical.
You want to keep sections clear, not overpopulated and consistent. Consistency being the keyword, as you may find that your homepage looks like an episode of ‘Kitchen Nightmares’ if you’re not careful enough. Point being that you want to plan ‘practically’.
You can see the struggles that coders can face with an overboard design here.
Try to keep a simple colour pallet, keep to the exact same colours you’d use across the rest of your site. Keep in mind, you don’t want to get people hooked and as soon as they navigate the rest of your website, they feel they are in another domain.
“Read more >“ Calls to actions
“Read More”, you’ve certainly seen these buttons on other sites before, and there’s a simple reason for that. You want to keep your viewers on the ball, get them to navigate around and that’s when business starts coming your way.
It’s obviously not just use a “Read More” button on everything. You might be displaying a showcase of products for example, and you want to include buttons, or, Call-To-Actions as much as you sensibly can. Again, everything is great in moderation, don’t go overboard.
Your new Homepage conclusion
Now that you have the fundamental tools under your belt, you can use this to either improve in your re-design or produce your first homepage for your site, that truly works.
Be sure to also check out our own work here at Fifteen, our case studies showcase some great examples of sites we’ve already done the work for. Get in touch if you’re interested with our services too.
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