Today, most businesses that are influential in their respective sectors know one simple fact -when it comes to customer outreach, there are few things more important than having a good online presence. If you want to reach the widest possible client base, having a professional website is absolutely essential. And if you look at things more closely, you’ll also realize something else: on your website, your homepage is the most important part. Why?
In the digital world, your home page acts as your virtual storefront. It’s the first impression your website visitors will have of your company and product. If you want to convert these viewers into paying customers, remember, there’s no second chance at a first impression.
To succeed, you’ll want to focus on having the best possible homepage for your business website – and we’re here to give you an in-depth look at what it takes to achieve such a thing! So read on, and enjoy.
Why is a homepage important?
So, when you set out to design an outstanding homepage for your business website, as with any other design, it’s important to start out with the right mindset. If you have the right outlook on this project and its point, you’ll be able to create the best possible design for your client.
Furthermore, that client will successfully be able to market their services or products to their online customers. As you’ll see for yourself soon enough, it’s not just about having well-designed individual elements. Sure, hiring the right person for logo design services is important, but you also need to think about the overall impression your website homepage leaves.
Firstly, think about what the homepage is, but rather from the perspective of the customer. Obviously, once an individual browses for a service or product using a search engine, they’ll come across multiple results. If you’re lucky enough and your website is well-optimized, it’ll be among the very top results the user sees.
At that point, they’ll click on your link – and the homepage will be the very first thing they see. This is important because if you haven’t got an eye-catching, professional homepage, they’ll close the tab faster than you can say words ‘lost customer’.
With that being said, you want the first content the customers view to be as engaging and welcoming as possible. But what is considered a good homepage today? Let’s go over the elements of a contemporary homepage.
Efficient Business Introduction
When it comes to having a great homepage for your business website, the most crucial thing is understanding what exactly you want to achieve with it. As we mentioned above, your goal is to leave an impression that is strong enough to captivate the visitor’s attention, redirecting it to the service or product you’re offering. That’s why your homepage needs to effectively communicate the essence of your brand straight away. Hence, apart from choosing the best fonts, you’ll also need to think of things beyond the graphic design itself.
In a business website design, there are three crucial questions that any homepage needs to answer about the service, product or company at large. Bear these in mind as you work on your homepage design:
- What’s the brand identity? – In other words, what the service, product, and company are all about.
- What does the company actually do? – Why should a user consider spending money on your company’s services; what kind of value does the company provide its customers?
- Why choose the company? – Here, you’ll have to clearly present why your company is a better choice for this sort of service than its industry competitors.
Incorporating the three questions into your homepage
Obviously, your homepage doesn’t need to follow these three questions when it comes to its content. But whatever content you choose to fill the homepage with, at the end of the day – it’ll have to answer all three of these questions.
Sure, you can present your company’s product in more detail on other pages. However, to design a good business website, you need to understand the nature of people’s current online browsing behavior. With so many options out there, regardless of the chosen niche, people don’t have the habit of sticking around on websites that don’t tickle their imagination visually.
Thus, in order to do this effectively, quite a lot of businesses turn to the development of a marketing strategy that uses short bursts of information. In other words, if you’re going down that route – you want your homepage to contain a series of short taglines or slogans. These should clearly and effortlessly provide a spotlight to the company’s unique value propositions. Such taglines need to be designed to describe what the company offers in the simplest possible manner so that the user can instantly form a connection with the company.
Clean and Responsive Design
In today’s world of Internet browsing, there’s one aspect of your homepage design that you have to consider at all times – people who visit your website do so from a wide variety of devices.
From smartphones to tablets and PCs – your homepage needs to be optimized for all of types of channels. In fact, today, an overwhelming percentage of all Internet traffic is conducted via mobile devices. With that in mind, you need to make sure that your homepage is designed with responsiveness in mind.
Image source: Pixabay
But what does this mean, exactly? It means that your user needs to have the exact same quality of experience regardless of how they access the website. So, you need to make the navigation of the website easy enough in order for users to go through pages effortlessly, starting with your homepage.
The functionality of the website needs to be similar across all devices, meaning that you want all of the features on the desktop version of the website to be present on the mobile version as well. There’s nothing that users hate more than browsing the mobile version and then having to switch over to the PC browser in order to complete their work. There should be no separate ‘all-feature’ site; every version of the website and the homepage needs to maintain the same base functionality.
Furthermore, making the user experience on your website consistent will also be great in terms of marketing. It will help with maintaining the recognition of your brand. If you have a simple, but cohesive design across all of the platforms, your visitors can connect with the brand on longer basis. That will go a long way towards ensuring that they have a positive experience with your company beyond just the homepage itself.
Interactive, Dynamic and Engaging
Keep one thing in mind – people only remember the products, services and companies that they have an emotional connection with. While it may seem like a lofty goal, these don’t have to be deep-rooted emotions. A simple positive interaction with your website can help you achieve that, if the website leaves a good first impression.
That’s why you want your homepage to be as dynamic as possible. You want their interaction with the website to be memorable. Include as many illustrations, mini-interactions, games and animations as you can, while also making sure that your website does to not appear too cluttered. This is a thin line to stride on, but it’s essential that you manage to do it. You’d be surprised how many people remember a website just because it has interesting animations in its footers and headers.
Image source: Pixabay
You’ll also want to update the content that you’re presenting on the homepage constantly, and we can’t stress this enough. If the user sees that your homepage is outdated at first glance, the chances that they’ll immediately close the tab are over 90%. That’s why your website design needs to be in line with the current needs of your customers, as well as your service or product lineup.
Sleek Navigation
Once a user decides to browse your website, this should be an extremely easy-going, user-friendly experience. As we mentioned above, positively-charged interactions with a homepage leave a lasting impression on a user. However, there’s another side to that coin – negative experiences will also leave an impression, just not the one you’d like. That’s why you should always make sure that your users never feel frustrated when interacting with your homepage and the overall website.
Your interface will have to be intuitive and smart. People picking up a smartphone for the first time need to be able to use it. The homepage should only contain menus you can navigate through with ease, and all users should be able to identify the different visual elements without difficulty.
So, label the elements which link to other pages clearly, and present a clear layout of the pages so that users don’t have to spend a lot of time searching for what they need. That way, your homepage is set to ensure a positive user experience with your company, one that will have them converted to returning customers!
