How To Design a Website Homepage

Your homepage is probably the most important page of your website. It is the first page indexed by search engines and the one most landed on by visitors. Therefore, it’s extremely important to design a page that has value.

There is no magic formula for a successful website. However, there are conventions, which increase the likelihood of success.

When designing your website there are three maxims to keep in mind:

Just because you’ve seen something used on another site, doesn’t mean it’s a convention. Mimicking bad design doesn’t lead to success.  One of the hardest things to master is to learn to differentiate between what’s “cool” and what’s useful.

This means that users form their expectations for your site based on what's commonly done on most other sites. If you deviate, your site will be harder to use and users will leave.

Now, we are in now way suggesting that you use templates or settle for something stodgy. There is a lot of opportunity for creativity in web design conventions but if you don’t understand why a convention exists, you don’t know when to bend or break them.

Rather than trying to have a business website that’s WOW!-ZOOM!-COOL!, follow the proven guidelines to success. The time to be innovative is during product development. The time to be conventional is during web development.

As to website home page design, consider the following as conventions that should be followed. Your business website homepage should:

Don’t hide this information in generic language that makes little to no impression on prospective customers. 

Do remember when users have needs, they typically query search engines and allocate only a few seconds to scan each of the sites that the search engine drags up. Hiding or obscuring your message is the same as not having one at all.

Don’t assume that because it looks good on your screen it will look good on every screen.

Do appreciate that different users have different monitor sizes, different resolutions, different browsers, different operating systems and different personal settings.

Do allow your website team to design for the most common factors.

Don’t pick colors just because you find them pretty or cool.

Do use a consistent color scheme to guide and aid users through navigation.

Do use different colors to distinguish visited and unvisited links.

Don’t use gratuitous graphics that distract users from critical content.

Do use photos that have an obvious connection to the content.

Don’t use splash pages that offer no value as they have no critical information and are merely decorative and have little to no SEO opportunities.

Don’t overpower your home page with too much information.

Do use your website home page to offer teasers about each sub section of your website.

Do offer the most important information to a user: who, what, where, when and why.

Following these homepage conventions will GREATLY reduce the bounce rate of your site. By offering a clear narrative and navigational sequence presented in an attractive manner, a website homepage makes a first impression that leads to better return on investment.