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What your home page says about you |
The chances are that your site’s home page isn’t saying a great deal about you. A lot of companies realise that these days, using the internet is an essential marketing channel for what they want to sell. People do tend to forget that their customers aren’t completely fixated on their products though, and tend to showcase the items they want their customers to focus on at the moment on their front page.
Therefore, commonly on website front pages, you only find things like: what products the company has on sale; news/press releases, events/announcements, navigation; and search sections.
What’s missing though is a clear description of your company. If a customer isn’t clear about what you sell, you may lose them straight away.
It may be true that your existing customers already know who you are and what you sell, but you still need to attract new customers as well as maintaining your current ones, and in order to do this, you need to advertise yourself effectively so that everyone can instantly see what is on offer if they shop with your business.
You need to aim to balance what your returning customers want to see, and what new customers want to know in order to make the decision of whether your company is trustworthy enough to shop with, and does it sell what they want for the price they want.
All you really need to do is write a couple of sentences, possibly including some links for people who are interested in learning more. You don’t want information about your company to overpower your page so that returning customers can’t find what they want, but you do need a little something for new customers so that they don’t feel alienated before they have even had a chance to see what you have on offer.
If you don’t know what to put, just look at some of the classic, big companies, especially those whose names don’t give any indication of what their purpose is, home pages for some ideas to help you decide what is and isn’t important to include and what new customers want to know.
So, things you should include on your home page if you want it to be effective and attract new as well as returning customers, are: a summary of the purpose of the site. This should preferably be textual, but may also be obvious from the layout of the site. Also, you should have something so that new and returning customers can visualise the kinds of things you sell; a clear link to another, more detailed information page, should your customer wish to learn more about your company, for instance a link to an ‘about us’ page; and most importantly, your home page should be visible to all browser types in such a way that customers with lower resolution browsers don’t have to scroll down the page in order to find important information.
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