Ads 468x60px

Does Your Homepage Do Its Job? - DailyBlogTips

Does Your Homepage Do Its Job? - DailyBlogTips

Does Your Homepage Do Its Job?

Posted: 16 Apr 2015 03:56 AM PDT

Homepage to your website is like the window of your shop. It needs to be well designed and offer good quality information, because only that way you will be able to turn thousands of window shoppers into regular visitors or even customers, and to decrease the bounce rate of your website or blog. For the homepage to be good it should have these characteristics:

Short and Effective Presentation of the Author or the Company

To be honest, most of the bloggers that read these articles are not Paulo Coello, and the small business owners don't have products like Coca Cola or Nike Air Max in their range. A homepage should clearly describe the website or blog and give relevant information to the reader on what kind of content could be found on the website in question.

This can be done effectively with a one sentence tagline placed at the bottom of the page. This should summarize the blog content or company's business in one or two sentences.

Easy Navigation

This should be the top priority for the website administrator. A homepage is the starting page from which viewers go to the part of the website or blog that interest the most. Good navigation should be the main characteristic of a well-designed homepage. It should have a well designed menu, several recent posts can also be very helpful, as well the search box. For the blogs category listings, monthly archives and tag clouds can also help the viewer to find the blog post they are interested in.

Responsiveness

From 21st April, a Google Search algorithm for mobile devices is going to have an update, nicknamed "Mobilegeddon". From that date on, mobile websites and the ones that have a responsive design are going to receive better ranking for mobile searches. Since around 30% of overall searches come from mobile devices, this update is going to have a great effect on search rankings. That's why the configuring responsive homepage is a definite must.

Links to Social Media Profiles and Pages

Good homepage should contain links to social media pages and profiles because good social media strategy is one of the best ways to attract new visitors. These links should be placed in the form of graphic images, using social media network logos. These logos are recognizable to most of the visitors and they automatically draw attention. They are important because turning organic visitor into a social media follower will make him/her come back to your website, whenever something interesting pops out on his/her timeline.

Homepage Should Be Well-Designed

Web design is still very important, no matter webmasters are able to choose between hundreds of free WordPress themes. This innovation even made this area much more competitive. It is advisable to hire a professional web designer, and if you decide to choose some of the free or paid WordPress themes by yourself, always choose the one that is pre-adapted to your website's niche.

Well-designed homepage is easier to navigate, it comes with enjoyable reading patterns and its colors are adapted to go well with the company logo and banners.

It Shouldn't Be Crowded With Ads and Commercial Offers

Since the homepage is usually the most visited pages on every website, webmasters often place tens of ads on it and draw away thousands of viewers. People don't like too commercialized content and especially popping ads that can be very annoying. Some WordPress plugins for displaying Google AdSense place an ad from each blog post on homepage timeline, this option should be turned off, because it doesn't bring any new clicks and it makes your blog less transparent.

Pop-up ads on homepage are definitely a bad idea, since if the first impression of your page is going to be a commercial offer it will have a disastrous effect on the number of visitors and you can even get penalized by Google's Page Layout Algorithm.

Easy to Load

Webmasters often decide to make their homepage in some complicated flash format. This is wrong because homepage should load easily, even for the people who don't have high speed internet. It is easy to check the loading speed of your website with some of the online tests. To make your website and homepage lead faster, you can cache web pages, minimize HTTP requests, put script references at the bottom and optimize your content or images.

Neil Adams is an Australia based entrepreneur and aspiring writer who's been running his own online business for four years now. His interests are in the fields of marketing, startup culture, business psychology and self improvement. When not in his home office he loves adventuring around Australia and beyond.

Wanna learn how to make more money with your website? Check the Online Profits training program!

0 comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)