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4 Questions for an Effective Home Page
by Mackenzie Fogelson, M.A.
Printable Version
When a visitor lands on your home page, you have 30 seconds or less to communicate the value of your Website and your company. Convince your visitors to stay by providing the answers to 4 simple questions.
- Who are you?
Although this seems like a fairly obvious question, many Websites fail to answer it effectively. Can a visitor quickly identify the name of your company? Is your logo easy to locate and read? Certainly the design of your Website dictates the best place for your logo, but most visitors expect to see it at the top left-hand side of the screen.
Regardless of placement, make sure your logo is large enough to find so that visitors don’t have to work to understand where they are, or who you are.
- What do you do?
What you do may seem obvious to you and your existing clients, but what about your potential clients? Provide a brief paragraph—or even a tagline incorporated into your design—that effectively communicates what your company does.
Additionally, provide easy access to company information in an About or Profile section in case your visitors want to learn more about your company.
- What can you do for me?
A few years ago, the trend on home pages was to provide a narrative (several paragraphs) that summarized information about the company, as well as what the Website had to offer.
Currently, the trend tends to favor brief highlights that quickly illustrate the benefits of the company as well as valuable information that is offered throughout the Website.
Rather than overwhelming your visitors with too many choices, provide just a few site highlights on the home page. This information can be easily displayed in a column-type layout that features brief content and links that send visitors directly to the feature that is of most interest to them.
Also, be sure to update your home page often by changing the highlights, directing visitors to a new part of your site.
- Where do I go from here?
It would be ideal if all of your visitors chose to navigate through your Website by clicking through to the exact page that you want them to see first. If they don’t do exactly what you’d hope, what are their other navigational choices?
Make sure that the main navigation for your Website is easy to find. Use general, universal terms when labeling your major sections so that your visitors know which link will be most relevant for their purpose. Provide a site map that lists all site pages and materials in case they don’t want to click around to figure things out.
What about interior pages?
Although the home page of a Website is a very popular and visited page, many visitors will not enter a Website from the home page. With the growing popularity of search engines, more and more visitors will be placed into your Website on a page other than your home page.
No matter where they enter, make it easy for your visitors to understand where they are, find out who you are and what you do, and what value your Website and company has to offer.