How Well Does Your Homepage Convert?

Your homepage is the first encounter many customers have with your business. How important is it to make a good first impression?

75% of web users admit to making judgments about the credibility of an organization based on the design of its web site. – Source: Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility, Persuasive Technology Lab. Stanford University, 2003

68% of U.S. online shoppers agree that they will distrust a site that doesn’t have a professional appearance. – Source: eMarketer, 2006

83% of businesses use the Internet to research and find potential vendors. – Source: Enquiro: Business to Business Survey 2007.

An effective home page is the first step to conversion. Take this quick audit of your home page to determine whether you could improve your home page’s effectiveness.

1. Does your homepage have a clear goal?

The overall goal of your website is to sell your product or service, but the goal of your homepage might be to entice clients to enter the site. The home page needs to give the user a reason to continue. It is the gateway to the rest of your website. Before looking at anything else, what is the goal of your home page? A designer must be intimately familiar with your goals in order to create an effective design. Your content and design should combine to support that goal.

For example, if you provide a moving service for companies, your home page goal could be “to get a business owner to call for an estimate”. If so, you need to provide on the page that allows a customer to make the decision to call you or at least explore your site. You might want to list the other services you provide which make you a one-stop shop for moving such as: warehousing and storage, rentals, office moves, or employee relocation? In the example below, the home page provides not one, but two, incentives to get in touch: “Live Online Support” and “Request an Estimate”.

If you are a custom home design firm, perhaps your goal is “to attract clients who share our design sensibilities” because you want to establish a reputation for modernist home projects. Therefore, your home page needs less information, but the design should be clean, minimalist, and reflect a modernist aesthetic while showcasing some of your projects. It’s unlikely anyone will buy a home right off the website, so a call-to-action would encourage clients to call you up and start a dialogue.

2. Can users find what they expect to find?

There are some basic components that should be instantly identifiable and easy to find. Users need assurance that they will be able to find their way around the site. Think about where you would expect to find elements such as:

• Your logo and tag line
• Navigation menus
• Contact information
• Site search

3. Is there a reason for every design element on your homepage?

Minimize clutter and make it easy for users to discern the goal of your homepage. Widgets, fancy navigation, or animated images may be eye-catching, but unless they contribute to the overall functionality of the homepage and its goal, all they do is distract. Distraction makes it harder for users to find what they need, whether it’s information or navigation.

4. Does your homepage layout prioritize important content?

Not all content on a homepage is created equal. One way a good design can prioritize content is through layout – the position of text or design elements. If you had to prioritize the content on your home page, what would that hierarchy look like? Now look at where that content is positioned on your page.

Studies have shown that we scan content according to an F-shape. Our eyes begin at the top left of a page, then to the right, then down. Are the most important messages on your website laid out to take advantage of the F-shape?

Source: Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, April 17, 2006: F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content

5. Do you highlight important content?

Point 4 explains how content can be prioritized through correct positioning on a page. But within each area of a page, you may want to highlight specific content – which can be text or graphical elements. To make important elements really pop out, you can employ numerous tactics:

• Whitespace: isolates the content or graphical element to make it stand out more
• Size: a larger image or font will cue the user that this information matters more
• Contrast: a contrasting colour or font differentiates an element from its surroundings. There is a reason why BUY NOW buttons are always high contrast.

6. Does important information look like an ad?

We are so inundated with online ads that our brains now filter out content that displays like ads, no matter how important the information. If there are important messages or call-to-actions, avoid design elements or positioning that could make them look like ads. In a now-classic experiment, users were asked to find the population of the USA from the US Census Bureau website. Even though this information was located prominently in big red fonts on the top right of the page, only 14% of visitors read and found the information.

7.  Page response times matter

A 2006 study by Akamai and JupiterResearch identified the ‘4 Second Threshold’ as the average amount of time that an online shopper is willing to wait for a web page to render. It is now 2011. Computers are faster, networks are faster, and consumers are even more demanding when it comes to page response time. The homepage is the first contact customers have with your company. A fast-loading clean, crisp design will do more for your brand than a slow, content-heavy page. Go back to Point 3 – clutter. Clutter not only deters due to visual confusion, it can slow down page performance.

Taking your Business across Borders with your Website

Moving your company from the local to the national or international marketplace is a dream for many businesses.  It’s much easier to tap into the local market, but the local market can only take you so far- there is a cap on how much you can grow.  National and international markets, however, offer an abundance of opportunities that simply aren’t available in the local arena.  But the problem, for most companies, is how to tap into this virtually unlimited market.
The solution lies with the World Wide Web.  Since the invention of the Internet, the world has gotten much smaller and it’s gotten ever easier for companies to cross traditional borders.  The process is simple, but it does require a bit of planning to effectively break into the larger world marketplace.

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How to Increase Productivity and Lower Costs with your Website

Websites can be a drain on company resources.  For the most part websites are difficult to maintain and update especially for companies that aren’t in the tech industry.  Traditionally, having a website has required that you also have a webmaster who is in charge of updating and maintaining the site.

The problem with this model is that everything must go through the webmaster.  If you need to make a change to your site, no matter how small it is, you have to contact your webmaster and tell them what to do.  Depending on their workload, it could take up to a week or more before the changes are made.   Not only is this inefficient and a waste of time, but it also costs money.  Webmasters aren’t cheap.  They know that most people don’t possess the necessary technical knowledge to maintain their websites themselves so they can charge large amounts of money and companies pay because there’s no other choice.

Take Control of Your Website

But there is a choice.  You don’t have to rely on a webmaster.  In fact, you can increase productivity by eliminating the need for the middleman.  Up until this point your webmaster has been the link between your ideas and your website.  Cutting out the middleman will save you not only time but money as well.

The answer lies in the way you manage the content of your site.  Using a content management system (CMS) completely eliminates the need for a webmaster while enhancing the integrity of your site.

Increase Productivity

A CMS is a website creation application that allows anyone to update the site with little or no technical knowledge.  CMS’s are designed with the user in mind and for that reason they are easy to use, update and maintain.  On the backend, the CMS is designed like a simple word processor.  This simplicity allows anyone to add, edit and remove content with a few clicks.

Instead of writing the content, submitting it to the webmaster and waiting for him to add it to the site, you can upload content instantly yourself.  As soon as a change needs to be made, it can be.   Content management systems are web-based applications so any user can update the site from anywhere that has an internet connection.

Lower Costs

Since content management systems allow you to update your website yourself, you will save money on the maintenance of the site.  There is a one-time fee associated with the set up of your site.  This charge includes the costs of creating the design theme of your site, setting up the navigation tree, configuring the way pages are displayed and formatted and also the customizing the site branding with your own logo.

After the initial set up charges, there are no other fees associated with your website.  Ever.  Because you can update, maintain and edit the site yourself, you no longer need to pay someone else to do it for you.  If you want to add images, you can do it through the CMS; if you want to add music, video or other multimedia, you can also do that through the CMS.

Adding pages is simple as well.  The look at feel of your site is contained within the code of the CMS so any time you add a page the integrity of the site is maintained.  Everything stays the same from page to page, which makes for a consist website, no matter what you decide to add to it in the future.   By simply switching over to a CMS you will add value to your company by increasing productivity and lowering costs for the maintenance of your website.

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