Principles of a Good Home Page

All websites need to have a good home page. Contrary to popular belief, visitors to your site will not always arrive on the home page first, but a large enough majority will that we need to make sure that our home page is effective. So rather than going over too many specifics that someone might take too literally, let’s go over some basic principles that you’ll want to consider when writing your own home page.

Before I go into some general ideas about the home page, please keep in mind that the main point of the home page is to leave a good impression and get people to move into the rest of the site. We don’t want people to sit on our home page. We want to grab their attention and get them to move into the rest of the website.

Here are some basic principles:

Length

How long should your home page be? Well, to be vague, let’s say not too short and not too long ;-). Ok, seriously you want it to be at least a page length long. Now of course, this will vary for each monitor resolution. If you start off by shooting for about 300-500 words you should have enough to fill up that space, especially once you start adding other features like images and sample products. Essentially, if someone comes to your home page and you only have one paragraph and a picture, they’re not going to stick around.

Easy to Read

Remember that the point of the home page is to grab attention and help people to move on into the rest of the site. So, just having a bunch of paragraph text isn’t going to cut it. So we need to include some other attention grabbers that are quicker and easier to read. Things like a good headline, bullet points, important phrases in bold, and links to other parts of the site can be very helpful in this area.

Sampling of Products

If you have something to sell, let’s get some samples of it right on the home page. Naturally, you don’t have to put your whole catalog on the home page, but we should have a good representation of what you have to sell. This is also a good time and place to create some sort of a sense of urgency. Something like a sale that is only lasting this week or something like that can help to encourage people to really check out what you have to offer.

Use of Keywords

This principle goes with any of your pages, but deserves mention here. You’ll want to pick out 2-3 of your best keyword phrases and repeat those on your home page about 3-4 times each. Of course, if you want to get a little more picky you can check the actual keyword density (shoot for about 3-7%), but as a general guide shoot for 3-4 repetitions to get started. Also, don’t try and focus on too many phrases on one page. When you focus on too many phrases your writing will tend to lose focus and not be as good.

Just remember that the main point of having a home page is to grab the visitor’s interest and help them move on into the rest of the site.  The easier and quicker you can help them make that transition the better.

Related Posts