Hello everybody! I’m Brian Lewis with Tiny Frog and today I want to talk a little bit about home pages. I think we all agree that your home page can be the first exposure that a prospect has with your business. As such it’s very important to make sure you do the right things with your homepage.
I want to talk a little bit about some do’s and don’ts of your home page. Starting with the don’ts.
First thing is be careful of putting too much information on your home page. You got to picture that when your visitor lands on your home page, they’re much more in a scanning mode where they want to get some very background questions answered first before they start digging down into detail. So you need to resist that temptation to really tell your whole story and to provide an opportunity for visitors to quickly scan different areas of your page and decide to drill down from there.
Second thing is be careful of what we call false floors. Now a false floor is where the hero image or the hero area of your home page takes up the full viewable area on most screen size resolutions. That probably provides the best aesthetics in term terms of taking up that full amount of space, but the problem that we’ve seen with scroll map studies is that a lot of your visitors will think there’s nothing below the fold and they won’t scroll further down. Of course they have the scroll bar on the side of their browser but a lot of times they don’t pay attention to and we have seen this in scroll map. So what we recommend is to not have the full viewable area be your image or your hero area, have a little bit of that next panel peeking above the fold to give your visitors clues that there is more information below and even what that information is.
Also let’s resist the temptation to kind of go crazy on excessive font treatments. Font treatments aren’t really just a decoration item. Font treatments are great visual cues for your visitors, in terms of giving them the information they need to decide what’s a headline, what’s a subhead, what’s content. Typically it’s best to try to limit your font treatments to about three or so. Anything more than that, what happens is visitors will lose that sense of visual hierarchy and also can start making your page look quite cluttered.
Last don’t I want to refer to is more of a maybe than a don’t. Be aware of any kind of animations or auto start videos on your home page. Typically visitors like to have control of their own visit experience. Although we have seen some some great successes in visitor engagement and conversion with some auto start videos and animations, as long as they’re very much geared towards what your business does and they’re really providing that value. So the ones we want to stay away from is any kind of just background image imagery. If we have like waves moving in the background or even a busy office of people moving around. If it doesn’t add value to that visitor’s experience, give them the control – let them start that. Tell them what that video or animation is and let them make that decision whether to start it out. Our eyes are drawn mostly to moving objects so if an animation or video starts, our eyes are going to be attracted to that. As we scroll, our eyes are still going to be attracted back to it. It’s very powerful technique we want to make sure that we leverage it very carefully.
So those are the don’ts. Let’s talk about some do’s.
You want to make sure that you very succinctly articulate what it is you do and why you do it better in the benefit to the visitor very early in that visit experience. Someone’s landing on your website, they have a problem to solve. Now’s not the time to get real cute with some kind of messaging that that’s a play on words, because your visitors most likely won’t have the patience to stick around and try to figure that out. If they can’t quickly determine whether they’re in the right place or not, they’re probably going to bounce off your page.
Also you want to very early in the visit establish trust and credibility. Unless you have the brand equity of a Nike or an Apple, many of your visitors are going to be coming to your site with very little knowledge, or maybe no knowledge of your business at all, and before they really agree to invest time on on your site they’re going to want to feel that they can trust you and that there’s credibility there. So you want to consider trust and credibility early in the visit.
Also make sure that the visit experience is relevant to your visitors. We do a process called visitor profiling, which is really determining what are the main objectives of your visitors. After all, they’re the ones who are using in your website. We want to make sure that when they land on the site, that it’s very clear to them that their objectives can be met.
Another important do is to make it easy to scan. I talked about before how your visitors are really going to kind of be looking at your your web pages almost as a table of contents for your entire site. Make it very easy to scan. One of the ways that you can do that with your multiple panels is to have clear panel headings that tell the visitor what’s in the contents of that panel, that way they can make that decision. Is this important to relevance me? Yes or no. If it’s not, then they know that they can scan very easily.
So remember that your home page is not supposed to be the be-all, end-all of everything that’s on your website. Instead it’s supposed to be a means for your visitors to very quickly determine what you’re all about, if you can solve the problem, if I can trust you and what is available in your site.
If you’re looking to rework your homepage, or possible a full website redesign, feel free reach out to us for more information.
