Effective Home Pages: Business Websites

As I’ve mentioned before, websites are the most crucial part of an online identity for any company. People used to deliver pamphlets and brochures to tell people who they are. Now, with a few buttons they can get all the details they want. However, this ease of access means that they can find competitors and other businesses as well just as easily. The front page of the website needs to be developed in a way that hooks the viewer from the very beginning, while convincing them you’re the best and they should spend their hard earned money.

Websites come in all shapes and forms but what makes one stand out from the rest? There are a few things I’ll touch on. The first is instant delivery of who you are. Within the first 30 seconds, people should know what your purpose is, what your product is, and a call to action. Similar to how people don’t look past the first page of results on Google Search, people won’t look past the home page of your website unless they have an enticing reason to.

The most important aspect is the call to action. (Boag, 2017) This means that when someone lands on a page, they are instructed to do a task no matter how menial. The reasoning behind this is found in psychology; the more invested someone becomes, the more likely they are to invest more. Think of it as a sunken cost fallacy. It can be as simple as a button that says “Learn more here!’. To get an understanding of how effective it is, remember any website for a clothing store you frequently visit. The part of the website that immediately stands out is the sale or clearance button. They know this will get people to click further and browse their listings. It is quick and effective because they know what people are looking for.

Lastly, I’d like to tie this back to a previous post which was about search engine optimization. As I said in that post, the amount of time people spend on a website and the activity on that website directly correlate to the standings of said website on Google search results. This is vitally important to the amount of exposure a website gets to the public. For large, well-established companies like Facebook, Apple etc it is an irrelevant thought. When it comes to smaller companies or startups, this is an invaluable tool. When nobody knows who you are, getting your name out there is the utmost priority.

Leave a message in the comments if this post helped you in any way. Have you started looking at websites more critically, or if you have your own website did this inspire you to make changes?