It’s easy to argue that the most important page on a website is the homepage. It’s the page where a large number of users will start their experience on your site. Sadly, though, far too often we see sites with a homepage that is either too distracting or gives no clear direction to the user.
On some sites, it almost seems as if the designer of the site or the business is trying to fit all the sites contents on the home page. Sometimes there is a snippet of info about every aspect of the particular business. I’m not saying that every part of a business isn’t important, it’s obviously important or it wouldn’t be a part of the business. That said, the homepage of a website should be kept clear and really only focus on a couple of key part of a company. Hence the reason on a lot of our designs, we like to highlight or focus on 3 key aspects of a business.
A homepage should really be used to direct users to more information. Once they land on the homepage, we’ll provide that quick little piece of info (image, text, maybe a video) and then provide a link to get to another page of the site that has more content. These internal or sub pages can be loaded up with info (well loaded up to an extent, of course). It would almost be the equivalent of walking into a grocery store and being bombarded immediately with someone telling you about the sale of the day, someone offering you a free food sample, someone from the bank that has a location in the store wanting you to open an account, someone from each department of the store telling you about the great products they have. It would be far too overwhelming for that first 20 feet of a store. Ever notice that when you walk into many stores there is an open area that allow you to see the sort of flow of the store? The homepage of your site should act the same way.
If your website isn’t performing quite as well as you’d like it to be, take a look at the homepage. Is it possibly too cluttered? Look at your business and ask yourself “Are there three really key areas to what we do?” If so, highlight those three key areas on your site and help guide the users to additional content that they might be looking for. Don’t bombard users with too much on the home page. Let them enter the website, take a quick look around and find a natural flow of the site.