Homepage Strategy & Tips

Purpose of a Website Homepage.

If more than 12% of the visitors to your homepage leave right away, you may need to read a bit more. We’ll show you how to make your new homepage, or change your homepage, depending what stage you are at.  This is not technical, this is what your need to do as a business, then hand off to who every is “technically” taking care of your site, if not you.

A homepage isn’t what it used to be.  It used to be the single entry point for a website, a place where you dazzled all visitors with what your business and mission was.  Well, that was the 90′s if ever at all.

A good homepage is a popular entry point, and likely the place most visitors arrive.  In fact, it may be just the way you imagine it, or it could be far more people enter from sources like search engines and other sites to the places on your site where they actually want to go.  It could be that they have bookmarked another page on your site, or even published that bookmark on social sharing servies like Digg.com , StumbleUpon.com or Del.ico.us.

Regardless of how people enter into your site, your homepage is the convention for visitors to orient themselves to your business, and navigate to where they want to go.  This means that your site is one part sitemap, and one part branding message.

Site Transparency

A homepage needs to offer transparency to a site.  A site visitor, regardless of how they enter a site, should be able to arrive at the homepage an know 3 things.

1. Who are you.
2. What do you do.
3. What does it mean for them.

Site Transparency also means visitors should know what is on the inside of a site, by looking at its homepage.  Is your website transparent from the homepage?  Let’s talk about how to get it there.

Other Must Have’s

1. Hours of Operation
2. How to Contact the Business
3. Steams into site (See below).

“Streaming” Visitors

Not all visitors are the same.  Your site likely serves more than one audience.  Your homepage design needs to handle each audience in a clear concise fashion.  Each audience needs to know where to go, and what areas of your site are useful and intended for them.

Consider the Best First

Every page needs a primary audience.  If you are a new business, when you create the homepage, design it for your ideal customer.  If your business is established, the homepage should be designed for your best customer.  Other audiences your serve will have their place, ut you don’t want to risk the experience of the audience that brings in 60% of your business revenue for the audience that brings in 15% either.

Local Businesses

If your business’ clientele is locally based, than your website homepage needs to have certain information on it.  You should have the following on your homepage;

1. The area your serve
2. Address (include street, city, postal code & neighbourhood if applicable).
3. Location Map (cross roads version will suffice)
4. Phone #
5. eMail

For a local business, this information should be available on on EVERY page, not just the homepage. This is why I suggest placing it in the top right of the header. It is easily placed on every page, but is also quite visible do to the way people scan a page (top to the right 1st). There might be a bit of “banner blindness” to this position, but when someone is looking for something on a site, they most ofter return to the top right of the page.

Here is a local business I love . They make organic ice cream, serve fair trade coffee and have a great environment. But the one issue I have with their website is that when I went there to get their phone # so I could book a meeting in their back room, I could not find it. To make it worse, my meeting was with people who have never been and they might need a map on the site to get to this popular meeting place. In the case of the Red Trolley, they are on 32nd street, but not the more popular part of it. In fact, 32nd street is broken up buy a couple of streets and park area, meaning it is hard to get from the more know part of 32nd street to the now “emerging” part of 32nd street they are at.

This business obviously needs a map, and it needs to be prominent with their phone number.

If I were to “tweak” the site, I would use the area in yellow to provide a map with the crossroads defined well, along with the phone # and physical address. I would also try to get “Open Hours” in there too. I might even through up a link to map it with Google Maps and “pop-up” a layer with the map. The other page elements this would displace could easily go to other areas once the top navigation was tweaked with “About Us” and “Faces of the Red Trolley” being combined”, “Giving” could move into “About Us” as well. This would free up the best navigation spots for “Parties & Meetings” which could move to the left with About Us and a “Menu” area, standard in this industry.

Might Have’s

1. Special Promotions – If so, make it clear which of audiences it is for to avoid confusing the others.
2. Newsletter/eMail sign up – See the Quadrant below to see where to put this. hint:You want them to do this.
3. Most common tasks or popular pages.
4. Search – 9 out of 10 people will try to navigate from the homepage.  If you have heavy search usage than you likely have a poor homepage.
5. News – If you really have to, remember this is most likely you wanting visitors to know your news, not vice versa.  Consider of a link to news instead.
6. Trust or Policy Info – Letting them know you ship UPS or have Verisign Security on purchases is great, but not pressing information.

User Experience – Give ‘em What They Want.

Your website, especially your homepage will be more successful the more you organize information from the perspective of your site visitors.  Basically, you give people what they want before you try to present them with what you want them to know or do.  We call this user centric design, and it is important to remember who the site is really for.

Homepage Quadrant Guide – Put it in its Place

Here is a guide to use when you are organizing the content mentioned above and anything else you might have. Each quatrant (area) of the page is representative of a web page.  i.e. If user often go to an online tool, then place that in the top right quadrant.

Using this Quadrant as a tool to organize your Homepage, will ensure you are presenting your business from your customer’s perspective, not yours.  It is also great for any page, but works great with home, product and service page.

Quadrant Breakdown

Top Left – This is the information your site visitors want the most. This is what they want to KNOW. This is not the place to place specials unless you 1st “satisfy” your visitors questions about what you do and what it means to them.

Top Right – This is where to place the things your site visitors want to do. This is not an area to sell. It might be a good area for search, but only if that is what your customer WANTS to do. Offering quick links to the most popular areas of your site would work well here. If you take orders by phone, put it here.

Bottom Left – Here is where you should tell them what you want them to know. Additional services your offer, your specials, charities you support etc.

Bottom Right – This is where you offer thing you want them to do, like sign up for that workshop you offer, or sign up for your newsletter (unless your site is so great that is what they want to do, which is rare).

Summary

What you read is more than a philosophy of page design. It is based on best practices, common sense, experience and long term strategy. If you organize your homepage as suggested, covering the key points mentioned here, your homepage will be what is supposed to be, and what your customers need. I suggest finding out your current “bounce rate”, the % of people immediately leaving your homepage, and compare it after you reorganize your page. If is not cut in half, I would be surprised.

If you have a homepage you would like to have feedback on, please leave a comment and I will take a look it and give my two sense, as will (I hope) other readers.