Tips for Creating a Successful Website Homepage

The website homepage is the most important piece of your web presence. The majority of visitors will likely enter your website through this page, and you have only a few seconds to make a good impression and convince them to spend more time on your web site.

This article explores how to create a successful homepage that will help to generate more business and traffic to your website. While there are a number of tactics to help create a productive website homepage, I offer a few tips to help you get started:

Ensure that within a glance, visitors know what your site is about
Today people have short attention spans. With the amount of information available to us, we will only spend a couple of seconds visiting a site before moving onto the next. You want to make it easy for your visitors to know that you offer them what they are searching for. A brief introduction text, or strong imagery that illustrates the purpose of your business will allow visitors to quickly understand your website and business.

Provide information about your business, and how you can help them
We all like to know who we are doing business with, so offer a little about your company. Of course you don't want to give your entire company history, but a few short sentences hitting on a key aspects of your company mission statement will help you connect with your customers.

Direct visitors to two or three important areas of the site
In addition to offering information about your business, the role of a homepage should be to distribute visitors to other useful areas of the site. Deciding on the key areas to highlight can have a large affect on the success of your website. I have found that the most successful strategy is to provide quick easy links to two areas of a site that visitors want to go, and provide a quick, easy link to another area that I would like my visitors to see.

Ensure that the homepage is a clean and professional design
Professional, clean, and usable design is the cornerstone of a good website, and your website homepage is perhaps the most important page to get right.  

A successful website homepage educates your visitors, and distributes them to deeper areas of your website. It is important to keep your homepage simple and easy to use by avoiding the tendency to do too much. Using the tips discussed above will help your visitors find the information that they are hoping to find, which means positive results for your business.