Elements
of a Well-Designed Home Page
Okay,
you've finally made it. Your web-site is or at least the home page is
ready. We shall discuss here essential items your home page should have
as home page is the most important page in your whole site. A visitor
(and potential customer) who reaches your site for the first time, will
decide inside of 30 seconds whether to read on or press the stop button.
If you or your designer is new in web design, resist the temptation to
spring surprise on unsuspecting visitors ! Remember, you are designing
a business site and the visitor is looking for something useful. Think
yourself as a visitor and choose content accordingly.
A well-designed home page has the following characteristics:
1.It provides an overview of what is available on the site, and every
section of the site can be reached from the home page, either directly
or with no more than 2 or 3 clicks.
2. It looks attractive and projects the right image for the company, but
it still loads in a reasonably short amount of time. A balance must be
reached between whizzy graphics and fast page loading.
3.It reinforces the branding of the company or product, so visitors instantly
know what site they have landed on.
4.It shares certain elements with all the other pages of the site, so
that the pages all fit together, and visitors get a sense of the pages
belonging to one site, rather than being a bunch of unrelated pages.
5. A home page usually includes a small amount of content, even if only
a brief description of the company, but its main purpose is as a list
of links to other pages where the real content resides. A home page is
much like the table of contents in a book or magazine.
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Most business home pages will have the following links:
About
the Company
Our
Products and Services
How
to Contact Us
Any site that also sells products online should have another:
Order Here !
The fewer clicks required to get to your ordering page, the more orders
you are likely to get - it's a statistical fact. Put your ordering page
one click away from the home page (and perhaps from every other page
as well). Actually, it's probably better to call the link "How to Order"
or some such, and make it clear to the user that they have not committed
themselves to ordering anything until the credit card number is submitted.
A well-designed site offers the following no-pressure button:
Add to Shopping Cart (You can always remove it later)
Most sites, of course, will have more than the above-mentioned four
navigational items on their home page. What you have there depends on
the purpose of your site. Whatever's important, whatever you want people
to see, should be right there, not buried several levels down.
Resist the temptation to give your navigational titles clever but ambiguous
names. Of course you don't have to stick to the plain vanilla examples
above.
Who
We Are
What
We Do
Where
to Find Us
The purpose of your site is to provide information, not to entertain
with word games. So, choose your content with care - not everything
you like. That approach is OK for personal home page - not in business
sites.
Do your users a favor and make it clear what they'll get when they click
on a link. If your site features downloadable files, audio or video
links, or other bandwidth hogs, list the file size next to each link
so users will know what they're getting into. Inform.
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