Are You Driving Them Away? Simple Steps to Evaluate Your Home Page.
Sep 17th, 2007 by Do
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Take a look at your home page. It’s the first page people see when visiting your site. Does it have impact, clarity and interest grabbing images or text? Or is it bland, ordinary, unhelpful and difficult to use?
FACT: 85% of people ABANDON a new site due to poor design.
FACT: 50% of visitors are LOST because they can’t easily find content.
Below are 7 tips to evaluate your home page to generate a far greater impact and increase consumer interest and sales.
- Is it clear at a glance what you do or offer?
Customers aren’t going to read through all your copy or visit two pages to find out what you sell. It must be clear to them in the first three seconds. Don’t bury it or you’ve lost them. - Can customers easily see where they need to go or is your site all chopped up?
If there are boxes all over your home page with information, but no clear flow of how to use them, you’re confusing people. Boxes are fine, just be sure there’s a clear line of progression. If you intend them to start at box or point 1, then move on to 2, 3 etc., there had better be a very defined way of moving visitors that way. How confused would you be if you missed step 3; add 1 cup of corn meal when making cornbread? The result would be a disaster. Same with your customers. - After landing on your home page, do people need to scroll right or left, up or down?
Scrolling right or left is a major design flaw and should never, ever be necessary. Up and down is fine as there’s no way to include everything you need in just a small space. However, everything that’s important should be visible from the moment a visitor lands on your site, without scrolling anywhere. Newspapers call it “above the fold” and websites use the same concept. Make sure everything important is above the fold on your home page. - Is there enough white space to break items up, or is it too busy and overwhelming?
Yes, you have a lot to say, but no breaks or white space increases the stress levels and confusion of readers. Even though it’s tempting, everything doesn’t have to be on the home page. Identify what is most important, put it on the home page, then build and link from there to other pages with more info. Don’t muddle up your main message. - Keep it simple. What can you eliminate?
Don’t, don’t, don’t say something useless like “Welcome to my site.” People use the internet to find information. Wasting their time with sentences that don’t actually help or tell them anything is a sure way to turn them off. Tell them something useful. Grab their attention. We’re all conditioned to be nice, but ‘nice’ doesn’t work when people just want information and are short on time and patience. Get to the point. Ask them a question. The human mind is forced to answer and that gets them involved. - Is your web copy convincing or boring?
Be honest. Read through your home page text. Are you convinced? Would you buy your product or service? What questions or fears have you perhaps not addressed? Start by identifying a problem your customers may have. Describe it. Now describe how your product or service will help. If a major overhaul is necessary, putting it off only loses you money. - Is your site navigation simple, effective and consistent?
Do your customers need to search around to find your link navigation? Is it easy for them to glance and find just what they want? If they have to put real effort into getting what they need, they’ll leave. From the home page to the ninth page they visit, your visitors should see your link navigation presented clearly, in the same place on every page, with each link named appropriately with clues as to that page’s content. Every page should be accessible from every other page on your site with legible text, colors, fonts and sizes. A home page with ‘next’ is an extremely poor way to navigate. Don’t use it.
These tips should help you begin to identify problems with your home page and understand how to fix them. Ask your friend or neighbor to look at your site and have them give their honest feedback. Ask them each of the questions above. Identify what needs to be changed and call your webmaster to do it. If your home page is mediocre, 95% of your visitors won’t go any further. They’ll close out your site and visit another. Don’t let that happen. Grab them!
P.S. If you’re interested in having your web site’s home page evaluated by an expert, you may contact me. Cost is $55 for a written report, or $40 if you wish to call me and receive the information over the phone and ask questions.
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These are really good insights to what is important about the first page, I agree with you -it has to have impact without being boring and easy to navigate. I am going to check my website over and go through each step. Thank you for the great points to evaluate your website.