When designing the website for your business, it’s crucial to consider your home page. Of course, all pages of your website are essential, but it’s the home page that directs users to other parts of your website. Some brands though are guilty of failing to put the necessary effort into their home page and thus don’t sustain sufficient web traffic to their website. We present five key features that should appear on your home page.
1. Social media links
It’s now crucial for brands to have not only a strong website but also an active following on various social media platforms. You want to ensure that you can convert steady website traffic to social media and vice versa. The process begins by ensuring links to your social media pages are prominent on your home page.
Of course, you can add them to other pages on your website as well. The critical concept though is to ensure they are easy to find. Remember, some users will not go beyond your home page and want to find information quickly. Ensuring you have social media buttons at the top of your home page makes that process as simple as possible. Equally, if they are only at the bottom of the page, they can easily be missed.
2. Brief description of your business
Many brands will have a separate page that provides details on the company. Of course, this is a bright idea because it allows you to provide a full list of those working for the brand. However, a brief description on the home page is still a good idea.
Remember you can always provide a link to your full about us page underneath a brief description. The description though can provide details of the industry you operate in and which customers or clients your work may appeal to. Also, if you have a niche you operate in, having a brief description can let users instantly see if they are in the right place for them or not.
3. Information on your products and services
Again, you may have a full page detailing the services that you offer, but a little information regarding them is needed on your home page. Customers or clients need to ensure you provide services that will appeal to them before they want to go any further into your site.
The critical approach here is to provide a brief description with a link to your main page on services to find out more. Therefore, you want to pinpoint the broad services you offer without getting too much into the specifics. For example, you can mention that you provide content marketing or social media services, but don’t get into the details of the packages you offer.
4. Highlight your latest blog post
Most brands now realise the importance of a coherent content marketing strategy. Of course, you should indeed have a separate page for your blog posts. However, you can’t be sure users will visit your blog page unless you give them a reason to do so.
Social media and email marketing can be excellent avenues to direct followers to your latest blog article; however, you can’t rely on that alone, and you want to encourage a user on your home page to visit other pages on your website. One of the ways to do that is to highlight your latest post through an image, title and description of the content along with a link to it. Remember, it doesn’t have to be your most recent post and can be a popular piece of content instead.
5. Ensure contact information is easy to find
What brands sometimes forget about their website is the need to make it as user-friendly as possible. Of course, you want to make your site as appealing as possible, and fancy graphics certainly have a part to play. However, content always has to come before style to provide your customers with the best experience.
If a prospective customer or client likes what they see on your home page, then they may want to get in touch. Therefore, you want to make that process as straightforward as possible. Now, there are different ways you can do this, and you can certainly have a separate contact us page. However, provide some information on your home page such as an email address and phone number with a link to your contact form.
It’s all too common to see brands use a basic home page and focus more attention on the other pages of your site. However, this can be a mistake, mainly because most users will land on your site via the home page. Therefore, you need to put a lot of effort into directing users to other parts of your website.
