Is Your Home Page Bringing You Business or Causing People to Leave?
Your websites home page is the most important page of your website. It is the first page that your visitors see when they first visit your website (usually). With that in mind it should tell your visitors, or potential customers, what your business or website is all about with the first 5 seconds. If not, your visitors or customers may leave your site and go to a competitor or another site. Since the home page give people the first impression of you as a business it should deserve the most attention than any other page of your website (but don’t neglect the other pages either – don’t put all your eggs in one basket per say).
There are some important features that you should find on the home page. One of the most important (not in an order of course) is your navigation bar. You as the owner of your website may find things easy to navigate but it might not be as easy for first-time visitors. Make sure that the navigation is visible and clear, also it should be easy to use to prevent confusion. You should not have to provide instructions on what to do with the navigation.
Another important feature is how quickly you communicate what your website is about or who you are as a business. Your first impression can and will be the most important one. If your home page cannot tell the visitor’s what you do or capture them, they will leave your site and go someplace else. This means lose of a potential customer or reoccuring visitor.
When your home page and website are in development, make sure you keep all important information that you want the visitor to see above the fold. This means that you want to keep important information and graphics visible to visitors without having them scroll.
People will judge the rest of your site by the home page (jugding a book by the cover). If a visitor feels that the home page is poor quality, even if your content and products are good, they will assume that the rest of the site is just as bad and will not continue forward. So make sure you spend time fine tuning and making the home page clean and attractive.
Last but not least another important part of home page design, and you should consider this on all pages as well, is the title of the site. Please pay attention to the title in the top left hand corner of the browser. Don’t just place the company name, add some descriptive information about the company, something that Google will see to let people know where they are and give an idea of what you can offer the visitor. This is also good for Search Engine Optimization…that is a whole other story of course.
Four Crucial Components to a Website
Any web design company knows the importance of web design and the role it plays in making a website successful. There are many components that go into a website to make it successful and it’s no easy task, especially someone who is new to the world of the web. Of course you can go out and buy the software and create a site yourself and end up with a decent website. But decent in most cases is not good enough to help sales and bring traffic to your site.
There are four crucial components of web design that you should consider and focus on to make a site valuable to you and your visitors and in turn making it a success:
Search Engine Optimization (Search Engine Marketing) – this helps get people to your site. SEO is the art of designing a site in a fashion that gives the site an advantage for obtaining free and abundant traffic. One important aspect of SEO is selecting keywords that are relevant to your site. They should be relevant to your topic and your company. Once they are selected you can then begin the development of your site using these keywords and developing thes site so that is is SEO friendly. If you don’t spend time to learn more about the benefits of SEO, your websites success will be difficult to achieve.
Usability - to easily navigate around the site and find what you are looking for quickly can make or break a site. Visitors will not stay long if they have to click more than one or two times to get information they want or if they have to put too much thought into figuring out how to get the information they want. Keep it simple and easy.
Design - is the site visually appealing and clean. Keep the site looking clean, uncomplicated and have a balance in your layout. A pleasing design comes about when the colors help complement each other and graphics blend seamlessly and helps bring unity to the page.
Content - current, professional and relevant information is very important. Your visitors are coming to the site expecting to find answers to their questions, solutions to their problems and knowing that they can trust you as a company. Your content should be well-written, without errors and talking to the client. Keeping this information up-to-date is very relevant to your visitors and to search engines. As some say in the SEO industry and in the marketing industry – Content is King!
The web is very a competitive arena. To be successful with your website, you have to keep these four crucial elements in mind. Keeping these in mind can lead to a successful website.
Hello world! New Website Launch-freshening up that is…
Well, it finally happened! I got round to overhauling my single page website into a blog/portfolio full of information website that I am happy with. It’s been a very long time coming mainly because of other commitments, procrastination and striving to develop something that I was happy with.
I will be frequently updating this blog with different things from design idea, suggestions and other things that are helpful.
I hope you enjoy browsing and if you have any comments or ideas, either post them below or contact me.
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