Building The Perfect Homepage

Your website homepage is like the window of your storefront. Having a beautiful design, is like having a clean window with a great setup that invites your customers to walk in. If you want to have your visitors browse through your website, you need to have a page that will capture them in about 5 seconds, otherwise they will just click away.

The question is what are the basic elements to create the perfect homepage that will draw your visitors to “walk in”?

1. Layout

Make sure your homepage is easy to look at. Keep it clutter free, and make great use of white space. Your visitors may feel overwhelmed if they have too much information and too many images in one spot. Most importantly, make sure it is easy to navigate, have all your important content and images kept in an area that is easy to see.

With that in mind, keep images to a minimum, avoid using clipart, or too many icons, and keep your content easy to read, and short. Never ending content will also push your visitors away and onto the next website.

2. Images

As you may already know, images are worth thousands of words. Especially when it comes to your homepage, pictures have the ability of easily explaining what your website is all about. However, make sure your images are crisp and clear. Using low quality images can also push your visitors away. Purchasing general stock photos can be a good way to showcase general information on your homepage. Keep the amount of images on your homepage limited, so your homepage doesn’t become a collage or a gallery.

3. Colours

Just like images, colours are very important, and can relay many messages to your visitors. If you have an e-commerce store for example, using certain colours may capture your audience. Red can tell your visitors that something is on sale, green can say that your items may offer free shipping and so on. In this case colours on your homepage, need to be used through-out the entire website, to keep branding in mind, and not be messy.

Usually it is always best to select a colour scheme that works with your logo, or if your logo has multiple colours, even playing with those colours through-out your website may work well. If you are using a lot of white, make sure it is used correctly, sometimes it can make your website seem empty as well.

4. Text

This one is very simple. If your viewers can’t read your text, than you got a big problem. Using cursive fonts, or other fancy fonts, that you think look nice, can be a disadvantage. Your content needs to be clear, easy to read, and sometimes highlighting key points, by bolding text can easily summarize what a paragraph is about.

Visitors tend to skim through text, until they find what they are looking for. Use call-to-action headings with buttons for interactivity. Use Headlines with sub headings on your homepage to tell your visitors a clear message. Once again all the points above tie into your text as well, so make sure they are positioned properly, make text more interesting with an image, and use a colour that makes your content easy to read.

If you follow these main elements, creating the perfect homepage should be quite easy!