The Home page design is an extremely important design aspect for any website
A good home page design can build trust and guide your visitor to take action.
A bad home page design can increase your bounce rate and leave a bad impression of your business.
The home page is generally the most viewed page on a website, so therefore is one of the most important.
A strong, well designed home page design can help attract and entice visitors to stay on your website and navigate further, viewing your products/services, thus increasing the chance of converting from visitor to customer
Below are my recommendations on how to ensure your home page design helps keep your visitors. These are the principles I take in designing home pages for my clients.
You can view examples of my recent projects here.
1. hero image
A hero image is the first image your visitor will see, it needs to be eye catching and high quality to entice your visitor to stay and keep scrolling down your site.
A Hero image should convey what your company does through its image and using text to include your company’s tagline and message. It sits above the fold (where the visitor doesn’t have to scroll to see the full section). Using a call to action to entice visitors to venture further into your website is good practice.
The image should be, where possible a true representation of your brand, what you do and who you are. I advise my clients to try not to use stock photos here, however, in the absence of professional photographs stock photos can be the better option.
2. Good Design
A home page that has a good design will build trust, communicate value and help with navigating your visitors to the next step. User Experience is one of the most important aspects in any web design, but websites should still be aesthetically pleasing. Humans show bias towards beautiful designs, aesthetically pleasing designs will be deemed more user friendly to less aesthetically pleasing designs.
I am a big believer in less is more, visitors do not want to look for the answers, they want the answers to be presented to them. There are so many elements to consider in designing a page including the layout, white space, CTA placement, your branding, colours, typography, your target audience and much more, but this is for another blog post.
3. Introduction
I like to include a small amount of text of introduction on my clients company or themselves. It should be brief but include some keywords which will help with SEO. This is also a great opportunity to showcase your benefits on why a visitor should chose you over a competitor. It should be informative and friendly.
Less is more, be short, professional and to the point, the information you are providing is to attract visitors and convince them to contact or buy from you. Too much information is overwhelming.
I include that I work as a web designer Northern Ireland as this is my current target area, although my client base area is changing. This is why it is also important to update your website frequently.
4. Benefits
The “why your clients should buy from you”, this should be easy to read with minimal text.
These benefits are the primary reason a customer would buy from you or use your service. What way does your service set you apart from your competitors? These benefits can attract attention and make your visitor think that your service/product can benefit them, thus making them more likely to read more or buy.
Take mine for example below… A busy entrepreneur may look at my site, see ‘more time’ and think I could do with a virtual assistant to help support me with my digital marketing, this would save me 8 hours per week, time I can spend on other more important business matters.
5. features
List some of your key features, what you have to offer. Keep this minimal with clear navigation to find out more on your services/products page.
Using good portfolio of pictures with headlines can work well as images can sometimes be more powerful than words.
For example on my home page under Wed Design Services, I have a small portfolio of recent work. I have also listed a number of features I offer with web design including user friendly, fully responsive, good navigation and help with SEO.
6. Social Proof
Social proof can really help build trust.
Include a few of your best testimonials. You can also include your recognitions, awards, links to press mentions, statistics and certificates.
7. Call to action
Call to actions (CTA) help entice visitors to go somewhere else on your website. People like to know what to do next. This may include getting in touch, complete a form, sign up etc.
Your home page may have a few CTAs, but make one or two prominent, like the one below.
8. Contact Details
Always include contact details, these can be in a CTA or in footer section.
I always advise my clients to place social media icons lower in the page and not the header part, as this can take the visitor away from the web page. If you divert your visitors to social media page, they may get pop up of message or alerts and then spend time on social media away from your site, they may not return.
Are you Home Page Design Ready?
I hope you find this article useful. I truly believe that good design principles, together with good navigation, aesthetically appealing, up to date website will make for great user experience. Good user experience makes for better conversion and SEO rates.
Imagine you get two recommendations for a website designer, you then visit both websites, the first site takes really long to load, and when it eventually loads it isn’t very appealing as it looks out of date, it has no testimonials and lists services only. The second website starts with a really inviting hero image with a beautiful website and information on how they can provide you with professional affordable websites, backed up with testimonials from clients. Who would you chose? (clearly I am option 2 if you check my home page lol).
On a final note, your website copy (your text) should be created with your target market in mind.
It goes without saying that your home page should also be fully responsive on all devices, it should look good on desktops, mobiles and tablets.
If you would like to get to know more about my services or how I can help you please do not hesitate to get in touch .
