In this article, we’ll share some tips for your website homepage design.
The homepage of your website is a critical element of your overall marketing strategy. It’s where you’ll find the most important content, so it’s important that it’s not just functional but also attractive and engaging. The homepage is an opportunity to catch the eye of potential customers and make them want to stay on your site longer.
Build a site people find useful and intuitive. No matter which web design tools you use, however, be sure you are designing your site with mobile users in mind and using responsive design best practices. Use the tips mentioned above to develop the best site possible, then start testing from there.
The best way to understand how you can make things easier on visitors is to consider the reason why they came to your website. Visitors often make quick judgements about your business in just seconds after arriving at your website, and the design may be a factor in whether or not they stay long enough to find out what you have to offer.
Your websites design is the first thing visitors will encounter, and they only have around 50 milliseconds to decide if they want to stick around or bounce off to another site, so the stakes are high. Your goal with visual hierarchy, or the way that every page on your site is laid out visually, should be to guide visitors towards the desired action, but in a way that feels so natural to them they do not even know that it is designed to lead them towards doing the things that you want them to. Website designers who know what they are doing can expertly lay out your websites visual hierarchy to order elements in such a way that your visitors will move to the most important features first.
If you simplify your users navigation of the site, you are giving them a deeper, more immersive experience, as well as a clearer path for conversion. Design your site so that people who are only capable of using their keyboards, rather than their mice, can use your site easily. In a world where there are over one billion websites that folks could potentially end up landing on, you have got to make sure that yours is designed with usability, the ease of using your site, and user experience (UX), the pleasurable feeling of engaging with your site.
Here are must-know best practices:
- Use an eye-catching header image
- Use simple navigation options
- Be consistent with color palette and fonts across all pages in your site
- Add social media icons where appropriate (but don’t overdo it)
- Offer plenty of white space (and avoid clutter)
Here are some pro tips to keep in mind when building your homepage:
- Keep it simple. A great way to keep it simple is by using white space and simple fonts (like serifs) instead of too many colors or images.
- Use short paragraphs that are easy to scan. People tend to skim pages, so make sure your paragraphs are short and easy to read, with no more than two lines per paragraph if possible.
- Use clear navigation links that are easy to find and follow (and feel like they were made for you). Make sure that each link is labeled correctly so visitors know which one they need next!
- Make sure there’s something fun on every page—something colorful or different from what anyone else has done before will help lure people in!
- Remember the importance of consistency across all platforms—if you make changes on one site (like changing the logo), make sure those changes happen everywhere else as well!
Hopefully, these guidelines are helpful for guiding your webpage structure and your site overall. A style guide is a helpful tool for web design, helping to ensure all pages of your site are visually consistent enough that visitors will understand that they are all connected together, and also to your brand.
When designing your webpages, be sure to test every single one on a smaller, mobile device to make sure that all links and buttons are easy to use. You have to ensure that different types of devices are able to access and navigate your pages – and the best way to do this is through responsive design.
Make sure that site visitors can quickly and easily find what they are looking for. You should be making it easy for visitors to find the information they are looking for when they visit your site in the first place, all while driving them towards the conversion tasks you are targeting.