Functions of a Business Site’s Home Page
Posted by Pedro in Web Design on March 5, 2010
As the page’s nickname indicates, your home page is extremely important to you. Playing with an old Tony Bennett song about San Francisco, you want your sites visitors to leave their hearts there. Okay, I’ll apologize for that.
In fact though, for most business websites, the home page is far from the most important. The page that earns the honor of being most important is probably one or two click removed from the home page. It is the one on which a converted visitor can perform an action that directly or eventually will lead to the company earing revenue. However, in most cases the home page will attract more first time visitors than any other single page on your site.
Assuming that you have followed a traditional link building plan, more external links will be directed to your home page than any other. Also, more than likely, your home page will be close to the top in terms of the number of internal links directed to it. Furthermore, if your site is not especially well designed causing your visitors to become lost in their explorations of your site, it is probably to the home page that those meandering visitors will retreat in order to get their bearings.
That simply means that your visitors will use your home page more than it might merit, although I took a circuitous route to get to that conclusion. As long as your prospects are loitering there, you better make sure you help them make good use of their time.
That brings us to our central question, which is what are the purposes of a well constructed home page in a properly designed Internet business site? Consider what follows to be a menu from which you may choose, ala carte:
* Serve as the foyer for your international corporate office and reflect the corporate climate, whether that is formal and efficient or relaxed and friendly.
* Provide directional signs to all of the locations that your most prized customers are likely to want to visit. Of course, your navigation menu will provide this service on all of your site’s pages, but, since this is often the first visit by many of your guests, the home page is an opportunity to help them understand the road maps that you will regularly provide.
* Assure that the business’s mission is clearly communicated.
* Tell your visitors what you want them to do. You might want them to buy a product, sign up to receive valuable information, learn about the topic in which your business is the expert or even all of those.
* Keep the whole place neat and tidy, making it attractive without seeming pretentious.
Those are some of the functions to consider for any business home page, whether you have a large, authority website or you hope to construct a small site for a business.