This is arguably the most important page of your site. This is where your visitor and potential customer gets their first glimpse at you and what you sell. If you don’t impress chances are they are going to go and look elsewhere. It works in the same way as a shop window or billboard really! SO, here is how you can make yours look its best!

Many visitors will get to a specific page on your site to start with as they will come in through a search for a specific thing on a search engine. Moat visitors who use this technique to find you will probably never see your official home page. So make sure all your pages look presentable. But for just in case they do click the ‘Home’ button, make sure what they find provides them with the information they want in order to keep them on your site.

‘Click here to enter’ sites

I’ve never understood the point of these, and I’m fairly sure a lot of people will agree that they are just an annoyance. If you use an animation, this will slow down peoples download speed, and even worse, if they have to download an application in order to even access your website because of this page. If they have to do that, the chances are they aren’t going to come back I’m afraid! So probably best to just stick to the basics and don’t keep your customer waiting on their content.
‘What am I looking at?’

You probably only have a couple of seconds in order to grab your visitors attention, after which time, (the patient creatures that we are) we start to lose interest. So make sure you have something on your home page that really makes your visitor stop and think (a Unique Selling Point). Once you have conquered this hurdle, you can move onto the task of drawing them in.
You can’t just use your logo or colours, fonts or taglines in order to achieve this. You need something original, something relevant in order to get your visitors attention.
‘How relevant is it?’

Your visitors don’t want to know personal information or what software you have used to set up your site on the home page. If they really want to know that information they will go looking for it. So stick to the basics for your homepage. Let them know what you have to offer to give to them as a site. By all means let them have links to find out information about your site etc, but it is not as important as the aim of your site.

‘Being visual’
Graphics can be a useful and powerful tool to promote a product if they are used properly, but too often they are used badly because people use them for the sake of using them. If they add nothing to your site there is no point to them, especially if they are over 5kb in size as this will jus slow down your page’s download time. Visitors looking through your page will look for simple, familiar clues. Graphics are often mistaken for adverts, so they may be overlooked.

‘Searching’
If your site is quite a big one, make sure you provide some sort of navigation. Most people will use something like a ‘search’ box, where your visitor can type in what they are looking for and press ‘search’ and see that results come up. If your site is really big, you might want to use more than just this though.

‘Don’t keep people waiting’
I have said it before and will say it again, as humans, we are incredibly impatient, and get more so as time passes. It used to be pretty much a 15 second rule – if everything isn’t pretty much loaded in that amount of time, it’s goodbye visitor. These days, thanks to broadband, you have even less time to make an impression.

The best way to keep things loading quickly is to send less data in the first place. Don’t use JavaScript navigation, don’t use too many images, try not to use tables and put all of your styles into an external style sheet and you should keep things running smoothly, and, more importantly, quickly!