Is Your Home Page Helping or Hurting Your Sales?
This blog entry was posted on December 31, 2009.
Your home page is the single most important landing page on your site. If it has a weak message, loads too slowly or is poorly organized, your visitors will just leave. You have less than 3 seconds to engage a prospect. Your home page is where you convince arriving visitors that you have what they are seeking.
Broadband connections may be getting faster but visitor attention spans are getting shorter.
- Load time: A 2009 study by Forrester shows 47% of consumers expect a Web page to load in 2 seconds or less. 40% of consumers would leave if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Slow load times can be caused by invalid code, media heavy pages, improper use of widgets/scripts or slow hosting.
- Simplicity: An ornate design will hide your message and it slows your web page load time. A talented designer may want to show off their skill, but message clarity is more important in making the sale. You do need a professional look and feel with clear navigation.
- First Impression: Place your important information and your call to action clearly “above the fold.” This is what your visitors see without scrolling. Start with a clear page headline because everyone reads them. Entice the visitor to read further into the body text. Your layout should take advantage of eye scanning patterns.
- Message: Your headline should grab your reader’s attention and the body text should stimulate interest and assure your reader they are in the right place. Are you clearly addressing the “burning question” that your ideal buyer will have? Write in a customer focused style.
- Navigation: Is your navigation clear and easy to understand? This is not a place to use creative wording. You want instant understanding to encourage visitors to move around your site. Arrange your navigation to form your ideal selling sequence.
Your home page is by far the most important page on your entire website. Plan your message and test to make sure it gets arriving visitors to take action and that it is interesting enough to draw people deeper into your website.
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Related posts:
- ABC's of Writing an Effective Home Page
- When Was The Last Time You Updated Your Home Page?
- How to Decrease the Bounce Rate on a Web Page
Filed under: Web Usability,Website Design
This entry was posted on Thursday, December 31st, 2009 at 5:44 am and is filed under Web Usability, Website Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.No Comments
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