So many business owners spend their time tweaking product pages on their website and forget about the importance of their home page. The home page is quite often the very first contact a consumer has with your business and we all know that first impressions count.
How do you design an effective home page? Well, here are 5 tips from our web design studio in Brisbane, which will help you optimise your home page for consumers:
- Lose the clutter: Your home page should be clutter free with lots of white space, a clear outline of the services or products you offer and a call to action. The purpose of your website is for visitors to dig deeper into your website and perform some action such as, read your blog, download a PDF or to contact your business. Too much clutter just puts people off and doesn’t give them a clear direction. Guide visitors, don’t bombard them.
- Call to action messages: Consumers need to know what you want them to do and how to do it. Do not give them too many unnecessary options or they may become lost and frustrated. Decide on the most important call to action and have this prominently displayed on your home page.
- Build trust: You must build trust with consumers, so your home page needs to convey, very succinctly, the services or products you provide, who are they appropriate for, your delivery area (if appropriate) and your core values. Use your home page to show consumers you are reliable and trustworthy by including testimonials, social media profiles, payment methods, accreditations, reviews, and your guarantee.
- Benefits: Explain the benefits of your products or services and not the features. Just because you know all of the features, does not mean that consumers are interested in them. Remember the old adage – “what’s in it for me?”.
- Carousels: This may be controversial to some, but you really only want imagery on your home page that helps to convert. So check your analytics and see how well your carousel helps to convert consumers. It might just be an annoying piece of visual pollution and a waste of valuable space that could be put to better use.
A last tip is to remove any auto-play plugins and videos. Consumers dislike it, and at the very least if you really want to include a video on your home page, give them an option to play it or not (totally forget audio auto-plays).
For information on professional web design in Brisbane, call GO Creative on (07) 3333 2932 or request a free online quote.
