There is little doubt that a good home page creates satisfied viewers. Whether these individuals are coming to your website to read a few blog posts or are there to purchase a product, the difference between a well-designed home page and a poorly-designed one can make all the difference in the world. Many people have their own subjective tastes, so it can be difficult to know what should be incorporated and what is better left out of any design. As it turns out, however, a good design when it comes to structure is much more important than any nominal aesthetics. In the following article, we’ll outline a few changes you should make to guarantee a better experience for your readers and customers, and ultimately boost the effectiveness of your site on them.

Crafting a Headline

What is the first thing that people see when they land on your website? If you are doing things correctly, then it should be your website’s headline. A headline is a brief description of what your site is about – it might be simply a title, or it could also include a simple summary of its mission. A headline shouldn’t be more than ten words long, so keep this in mind when crafting one. We recommend that you use an existing analytics program to determine exactly who is visiting your website, and then build a headline around the largest individual group. A well-designed headline can boost conversions by up to fifteen percent, so pinging noise instead of a well-crafted blurb can make quite the difference.

Use a Call to Action

So if a customer visits your website and wants to learn more about a product or service, how obvious is it for them where they can do that? The same goes for signing up for mailing lists or other free activities. If you do not have a clear call to action somewhere on the front page that is both visible and persistent, then you can kiss goodbye to your hopes for a more effective home page. We recommend that you install a pop-up call to action box that will appear after x number of seconds, as well as an embedded call to action somewhere directly on the front page. With two different ways to catch users, increase conversions and provide more information to them, you’ll see your home page’s effectiveness drastically increase.

Clean Design

It can be hard to find what you need when a design is seemingly patched together out of nowhere. Clashing colours, different font faces and a variety of mismatched images can all create confusion in the eyes of the reader. It used to be that more was more, but less truly is more these days. Rather than pinging noise in the form of excess, simplify your home page’s design in order to simplify the thought process of your visitors. If you want someone to make a purchase, then you probably don’t want them eyeballing this and that and everything else, which can ultimately distract the customer and lead to lost revenues.