Home Page Design

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The home page of your website is worth special consideration when designing your site. It should draw people into your site. It should engage people somehow. People will not stay at a website for long if they can’t find anything that interests them. So how do you design it?

For a good perspective on home page design check out this video at YouTube by Videospot. Here is a list of the points he made:

  • It should look different than the other pages in your site
  • Scrollable – the layout and content changes as you scroll down (full width, 3 columns, full width etc.)
  • Don’t use too much “flash”, if any (few or no funky moving elements)
  • It should function as your table of contents with links
  • The purpose of your site must be obvious – your role is clear
  • It should have a call to action to engage readers
  • Prominently display a few main content silos (keywords) with navigation to them
  • Clearly communicate with brevity with pictures, keywords, short phrases
  • Connects to main offer – what are you selling? – goes to landing page
  • Have a footer – perhaps a 3 or 4 section footer – a miscellaneous section

What’s the Goal?

What is the goal of the website? If you are website designer then the goal, at least when you are starting out, is to have people give you their contact information because they are interested in contracting you to build them a website. They may opt-in to a monthly newsletter. The goal also is to have people find your website when they search for keywords on a search engine such as Google.

Now that we know the objective, we can set out to define the steps required to doing that. One piece of that is to have a really good home page and landing page on your website. You can have a “silo” architecture. What is a silo architecture?

Silos

If you are a website developer or designer and you are selling your services, you want to divide your services into sections (silos) and make that a part of your main navigation. You silos might be WordPress, WordPress Plugins, Website Design, Website Marketing, SEO and so on. Under each of these topics you have subtopics that exist as pages. Under WordPress you could have Content Management Systems, Hosting, Installation, Linking, Plugins, Users, Comments and so on. Under Marketing you could have Website Layouts, Graphics, Colour, Effective Writing, Landing Pages and so on. Under a particular silo, like Marketing, each page is designed to have links to pages in that same silo as well as links to your landing pages. This architecture helps you gain higher rankings in Google.