Important aspects of Homepage design
For every website, its Home page is considered to be the most important. Most of them have this page as their landing page for the visitors. It has the most useable page on the site and people coming on the site from other pages also want to see the home page to know what the company actually does. From the point of search engine-based marketing activities, the Home page assumes importance since it contains crucial deep links to the site. Recognising its importance, the website design shall seek to make maximum use of the space of the Home page.
Here are some tips to design the home page:
Make the purpose clear: The website home page has to make the objective extremely clear to the visitors. It shall tell who you are and what you do. This can be achieved by writing a small tag line which sums up your work in one sentence or phrase. Write the window title using such words which are liked by the search engines and are based on you SEO research.
Make the users find what they are looking for at the outset: The home page of the website design shall not make the users go on clicking here and there to find what they are looking for. You shall know what the users would expect to find at the site. You got to match that expectation by enlisting all that information on the site. The websites also contain a search function for the same.
Tell what is there inside the site: This goes a long way to inform the visitors what is contained in the inside pages of the site. The same can be achieved by providing links beginning with important keywords.
Do not overdo the use of graphics, colours and boxes: Make the home page attractive is not the sole objective of a web design. The users do not view the boxes, colours and excessive design and formatting very seriously. If you use these too much, the users are likely to dismiss the same as ads and would actually be looking for that ‘real’ stuff which prompted them to come on your site.
Separate area for corporate information: The company information like ‘Investor Relations’, financials, etc are not viewed by most of the visitors. So, these shall not take up the important or prominent space of your website home page. You can club all that information at the bottom of the site, in small size fonts.
Contact information: If the home page is really very effective and the user wants to know more about the company like the place where it is located or wants to shoot off an email to you or call you over the phone, then do not make him go to ‘Contact Us’ page. Rather, give the email ID and phone number there on the home page itself.
The web design companies know how to design the optimal home page that makes site navigation really very easy for the visitors.