|
Home / Internet / Web Design
So That's What Goes On A Home Page!
By:Marcia Yudkin
In the early days of the World Wide Web, the word went around that the thing to do on a home page is to heartily and sincerely welcome the visitor. Today, this is unnecessary, cliched and ineffective. Instead, an effective home page needs to quickly orient the visitor to what the business or professional practice offers, distinguish these offerings from competitors' and direct the web site visitor what to do if they are interested in learning more.
It's especially important to make a strong and clear presentation on the home page if you want perfect strangers coming from a search engine to spend more than 10 seconds on the site when determining whether or not it is relevant to them. Getting business from such strangers is one of the major payoffs of having a web site, and they lack the patience of someone who has already had contact with you or been referred by a trusted source. Even people seriously inclined to hire you don't have endless patience to wade through hot air, jargon or superfluous preliminaries.
Therefore, a home page must make it possible to answer these questions within 10 seconds:
* What is being described or sold here? What kind of business is this?
* Why should I do business with this company rather than its competitors?
* What should I do to find out more or get in touch?
In judging web sites for the Webby Awards, I have seen as many rich, large companies as small ones overlook the first essential for a home page - set the context. Orient the visitor. The perfect stranger may need to know things that you assume everyone already knows, such as:
1. What business are you in? Include a commonly understood industry name or the generic name of your primary product or service prominently in the home page copy, if it's not already part of your business name or in the tag line. When this information isn't plainly and obviously stated, many visitors are screaming to themselves, "What IS this?" as they hit the back button on their browsers.
2. Who do you serve? So many businesses - banks, restaurants, dentists - leave it unspoken what state or province and even what country they are in when that's essential to someone figuring out whether or not this business meets their needs. When location plays a crucial role in service, make it unmistakable where the business is. Other times, the answer to this question is more subtle. You need to indicate that you work with Fortune 500 companies, or mostly with authors, or with ambitious fitness professionals and health club owners.
3. Why should someone do business with you? The best kind of answer to this question involves presenting the benefits someone gets from buying your products or services. Indeed, I recommend putting such benefits right in your home page headline. For instance, for a caregiving support site I created this headline: With Support, Caregiving Becomes a Rewarding Journey. For a site about a book on outstanding women scientists and artists, the headline read: Learn From Accomplished Women Role Models How to Create a Fulfilling Lifelong Career. Note the inviting tone of these headlines. Within the paragraphs of the home page copy, refer again and again to what customers get and what makes you different from competitors.
4. What should I do next? Even though you provide navigation links for people to choose where to go next at the site, it's effective to say explicitly what someone with such and such an interest should do. Your call to action might have more than one part, such as: To learn more about how Hyana Heights Club helps you stay healthy and fit, click here. To book your free tour and complimentary aerobics class, click here.
Use these guidelines to create or redo a home page, and you'll enjoy a significantly improved response from your web site both from people landing on your site from search engines and those already somewhat interested in what you offer. There's much more involved in turning web site visitors into customers, but you'll certainly thereby have laid the groundwork for a reasonable return on your web site investment.
Digg
del.icio.us
Blink
Stumble
Spurl
Reddit
Netscape
Furl
Article keywords: Internet, web sites, websites, design, homepages, marketing, customers, clients
Article Source: http://www.articles2k.com
Marcia Yudkin (marcia@yudkin.com) has helped judge the Webby Awards for 6 years, as well as the Inc. Magazine Small Business Web Awards. The author of Web Site Marketing Makeover and 10 other books, she performs web site reviews, web site makeovers and creates new marketing-smart web sites. Sample home page makeover: yudkin.com/sample8b.htm
|
|
| Top Web Design Articles |
- 1). Advanced Joomla Templating (pt1) Using Module Class Suffix By : Robert Palmer
an article from User Written Resources
1. duplicate the styles already used for the particular module, adding a suffix to each style name. this will definitely include some of the following;
1. .module {} 2. div.moduletable {} 3. div.moduletable h3 {} 4. table.moduletable {}/li> 5. table.moduletable th 6. table.moduletable td
and can include other styles used on the content in that section, such as;
1.
|
- 2). Irish Graphic Design Industry By : dave4
Graphic design is the use of color, light, balance, contrast, emphasis, proportion, proximity, repetition, texture and a plethora of other elements to create a work of digital art that is pleasing to the eye. Graphic design is about seamlessly molding image and text to convey a theme, message, or often advertise a product or service. Graphic design dates back to prehistoric times.
|
- 3). Adsense: The Smart Investment By : Pat Lovell & Jon Atwood
Over the last 2 years, We have been building a Virtual Adsense Empire of over 500 websites and making some good money. We've also been building content sites for clients using the same system. The system we use is not something that produces 1000's of sites with a click of a button, our system does not build spam websites, nor does it produce the same sites you see over and over and over again.
|
- 4). Some guidelines for Website Design By : Angela Oliver
You have a great product. You also have a great company image and marketing model. Now it is time to implement all your plans and bring together a website. You know very little about websites. Finding websites that have failed is easier than shooting fish in a barrel. Many people come into the internet business with the notion that if they are on the web, they are guaranteed to make money.
|
|
|
- 6). Develop Your Business Web Site for Profits By : Jay Peterson
Looking into developing your business web site? Whether creating a business web site to sell your business products online or just to give the public valuable information, creating a business web site can be an important first step to creating an important presence on the web. Here are some tips on creating a business web site as well as what is involved in getting your business web site off the ground.
|
- 7). Is your printing costs sky rocketing? By : Florie Lyn Masarate
Here are some things you can do to be able to lower your printing costs.
1. Cheap but good quality printer.
There was a time when only a handful of people can afford having one of those colored and digital printers. Now that these things are more rampant, they have become more affordable. Color printers of good quality are even inexpensive already.
|
- 8). Creating A Quality Web Site Design! By : Martin Lemieux
In this article, I will attempt to cover the basics of creating a great quality web design template for your site. Now it's a known fact that the layout or "eye candy" as I put it will determine whether your visitors will stay more than 15 seconds or they will just become another statistic.
In this article, I will attempt to cover the basics of creating a great quality web design template for your site.
|
- 9). How Does Your Website Make Me Feel? By : Philippa Gamse
When people think about the Internet, they think about technology. When people hear that I am a Website strategy expert, they see me as a "techy type".
But for me, the most intriguing aspect of your online business isn't about the technology. It's about human connections, and how you can create these in a virtual environment.
It's commonly understood that "people buy emotionally, not intellectually.
|
- 10). For Automated Sites - PHP and MySQL Are A Perfect Match By : Halstatt Pires
You’ve decided to automate your web site. Now what? Here are some ideas to help you choose how to automate your site.
A bit of programming is going to be necessary if you want to automate a site. There are many types of programs that can be used to automate a web site including JavaScript, PHP, Perl, ASP, Java and more. So, which do you use? For many, it is a personal choice.
|
| New Web Design Articles |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
- 7). Graphic Artists - Who Needs One When You Can Do It Yourself Online? By : Pearl Deloria
Image is everything! Think about it. How many times have you made a judgment about a company based on the quality of the junk mail that you have been sent?
Other people make similar judgements, too. Businesses cannot afford to be thought of as cheapskate in their marketing.
You know that most of your mail goes straight in the trash, and it may grieve you to spend four times the amount, just for it to be thrown away.
|
- 8). How To Style Your Text With CSS By : Hilco van der Meer
Styling text with CSS is really simple. We can define colors, underline it, make it bold, define the font etc etc.
We will start with some basics.
First we define the html where we will be working with. This is the text
1. Colorize your text
We can select the P tag and add some styles to it.
p { color:red;
}
Now our text will turn red. You can define any color code your want or choose one of the 16 standard color names.
|
- 9). What is a web designer anyway? By : Alicia Harper
As a web designer, I get all kinds of requests , for information other than web design, and as a web designer I'm not suppose to really to be able to do things outside of the web design area. I believe there are a few misconceptions about what exactly a web designer does. In this article I am going to nail down exactly what a web designer is and what they should be able to do.
|
- 10). Advanced Joomla Templating (pt1) Using Module Class Suffix By : Robert Palmer
an article from User Written Resources
1. duplicate the styles already used for the particular module, adding a suffix to each style name. this will definitely include some of the following;
1. .module {} 2. div.moduletable {} 3. div.moduletable h3 {} 4. table.moduletable {}/li> 5. table.moduletable th 6. table.moduletable td
and can include other styles used on the content in that section, such as;
1.
|
|
|
