Creating the Ideal Home Page

In the many visits to a website, a home page creates the first impression. It immediately begins to tell a story and allows for the creation of a connection with visitors. A home page needs to be welcoming, professional looking, building trust, answering questions, and providing clear direction.

Ok so what’s the problem? You haven’t defined anything yet. You can’t just jump to design without first thinking through your story, the answers you need to provide, your ability to build trust, and the manner in which you need to provide direction.

Defining and designing your home page is the most important thing you can do in website development.

Don’t jump in and rush ahead in a hurry to execute. Executing without properly planning will produce negative results. It will fail to produce what you want and it will create a negative first impression that you cannot eliminate.

Start with a clean slate, a formal process, and a solid plan. Don’t just jump into picking a pretty theme with 100+ options. Proper marketing needs strategy and execution.

Let’s first start with defining what success looks like for you and your future website. What are your goals and objectives? What do you need your website to produce? Common examples of a successful visit include:

Brand exposure

Subscribers

Leads

Warm prospects

Actual sales

To help formulate your plan, you have to know the answers to some critical questions that help define your target market, how you can help, and how they can convert. Ask yourself these questions and document your answers -- write them down so you can revisit them and validate your actions to them.

Who is your target market?

What problems or issues do they need to solve?

How can you help them solve these issues?

What service, product, or content can provide a solution?

Why should they reach out to you versus someone else?

Can you provide social proof?

What content can you offer as additional information?

How can visitors convert into a subscriber, lead or sale?

Once you answer the above questions, you’ll be able to provide some strategy to your process. You’ll be able to plan ahead and make sure your process is in line with your objectives and goals.

Define Your Website Personas and Create a Roadmap for Each

We now need to work further and dig deeper. Our next step is to clearly identify and document who comes to your website. If we can group these visitors into segments, we’ll be able to better market to them. We call these groupings website personas.

Here are two examples of personas:

University – Future students, parents of students, existing students, or future faculty members

Shoe Store – Men, women, boys, girls

Dig out a piece of paper and create website personas by segmenting your target market into individual groups. For each group, identify the following key elements:

Persona name

Demographics

Pain points and/or needs

The offering that meets their unique needs

Path to persona-based content

Call to action for converting into lead, sale, etc.

Defining personas helps you stay focused on the visitor. The process helps make sure that you are working for your visitor, which will help lead them to your desired action.

Now that we have our visitors defined into segments, we need to create a roadmap for each. You might be thinking this is common sense, but it isn’t. I talk to a lot of people who have groups defined, but forget to actually create content for each group.

You can use whatever method works best for you. Paper and pen with arrows, Excel, Word, or an online software package --  as long as you take a moment to document the route you would like each visitor persona to take within the website.

This step helps define what you need to provide within your website to properly service the various visitors and their unique needs. When website visitors are serviced properly, they are happy. Happy visitors convert and return.

Make Navigation Easy
Website visitors need the same guidance and direction. If your content is persona-based, they will want navigation options by persona as well. Before digging into home page design, you should have a navigation menu defined for at least the top-level items. Make sure this navigation clearly points visitors to core pages such as About, Products, Services, and Contact. Use common language and avoid acute (aka confusing) verbiage. If you have an excessive amount of navigation items, then consider a secondary menu.
Write a Brief Overview of Who You Are and What You Do
A home page should have text. Not a ton of text, but enough text to give visitors a quick overview of who you are and what you do. Make this information brief and succinct, while still being informative. The goal in this step is to write text that is easily digestible by visitors and help them confirm that they are in the right place. This will allow them to pause, look around the home page, and navigate to other areas of the website.Fight the urge to write a book here. I talk to a lot of people who want to fill this area with keywords in hopes of attracting Google. That doesn’t work for SEO and it should be avoided because it hurts the overall user experience.Users don’t want to read paragraphs and paragraphs of text on the home page. They want confirmation that they have located a possible match to their needs and they want direction on how to learn more about things that matter to them.
Create a Wireframe
We’ve reviewed a lot of information so far and I’m betting you’re wondering if we are ever going to get to design. Well we are almost there. Our next step is to create a wireframe, which is a simple outline of your home page.
It could be a hand drawn on paper or you could use PowerPoint or a online software package designed specifically for wireframes. It doesn’t matter as long as you take the time to drawn out what you need to have on your home page and where you’d like to position it.
Why is this so important? It keeps you on task and focused on your content and your visitor. Instead of hitting ThemeForest and getting sidetracked by glitz and glamour, you are focused on finding a theme that matches your needs and the needs of your visitor.
Populate Your Content
This is the magical part I love so much. It’s when real content goes into the website and the idea becomes reality.
As you populate your content, remember to keep the KISS theory of simplicity in place. People scan a home page, so make the content easy to read and easy to scan.
When you are done populating your content, take a step back and ask yourself how you did. Here are a few questions you can use to validate your work:
Does the home page adequately address your target market and personas?
Does it answer the key questions you previously answered?
Does it provide clear direction and navigation?
Does it help achieve the goals and objectives originally defined?

I Save Marketing is here to assist with all your digital marketing needs!

Source: https://www.web-savvy-marketing.com/2014/12/creating-ideal-home-page/