Web Design – 7 Things Your Homepage Should Have
Not all websites are built to achieve the same goals. The points below are written for typical small business websites that aim to sell a product or service to consumers.
This is by no means an exhaustive list but as a minimum your small business website home page should have the things mentioned below.
- Contact details
It sounds obvious but many small business websites don’t have their contact details clearly displayed on their home page. Don’t make it difficult for customers to contact you, make sure your preferred method of people getting in touch (phone number, email address etc) features prominently in your website header.
- Email newsletter signup box
Sending out regular email newsletters is a simple and cost-effective way to communicate with your customers and those interested in your services/products.
It’s a good idea to have an email newsletter signup box above the fold (somewhere where people don’t have to scroll down to see it) on your homepage.
- Company information
If you’re a limited company you should have your details somewhere on your homepage, usually in the footer. This should include your registration number and country your company is registered in.
You should also update your © date so people can see your website is current.
- A strong headline
Whatever you do, don’t waste the opportunity to write a strong headline by writing “Welcome”. First impressions really matter online and your headline is your chance to grab your reader’s attention and make them interested in the rest of the text on your home page.
- A call to action
Many websites lack a basic call to action. What do you want people to do? Ring you to organise a quote? Buy one of your products online? Whatever it may be, a call to action is simply asking them or persuading them to take the desired action.
For example, a call to action for a local home alarm company could be “Call us now to arrange a no obligation home visit because your peace of mind matters.”
- Links to other pages on your site
By linking from your homepage to other pages on your website you can make the navigation easier for visitors as well as getting SEO benefits.
Your links should feature your chosen keywords so for example “home alarms Edinburgh” would be better than having “click here”.
- Reader-focused text
A common mistake made by many small businesses on their website home pages is to focus on the company rather than the potential customer.
Visitors to your site want to know what benefits they’ll get from buying your product or using your services, they don’t really care about how long you’ve been in business or how many employees you have.
Hiring a professional copywriter for your website text is a good idea as they will be used to writing for different audiences.
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Good point about designing for visitors, but when you’re so involved in what you do, it is hard to take a step back sometimes.
I would also be very careful about putting my email address directly on my website without disguising it from spammers… I made that mistake once, and after regularly receiving over 100 spams a day, ditched the email address and started again.
Emma recently posted..Don’t Take Aspirin for Cancer Risk Reduction
Hi Emma, thanks for taking the time to reply. Those are great points you’ve made. It’s a shame people can’t list their email addresses properly without being targeted by spammers; more and more people seem to be using [at] in their email addresses rather than the @ symbol.
You’ve got some good points here, I think those would be all the things I was looking for when I look at a website for the first time. Well done, great blog!
Harriet recently posted..Write Off Debt
Well written article! Good job … I would also add a “News/Updates” section. From my experience I noticed that end-users love to see that a business is active, updates, news, company stories, even latest tweets (it’s a trendy thing) – call it as you want. It will make the business look more professional, active, user friendly, opened to the wide public, warmer if you like. I thing that since socialization and networking is a “must” these days, something like this should be present too on any website.
Hi Adrian, thanks for adding that – you’re right, people do want to see that a business is still active online. It’s amazing how many sites forget to update the copyright date in their footers. I saw one the other day that was an active company but said 2005!