Your business homepage is the centerpiece of your online presence. Home pages and corporate “gateways” serve as critical focal points for direct consumer interaction, and they do so even more than social media or mobile apps. Your firm’s ability to successfully communicate with your clients and partners is directly affected by how well your homepage does its job.
Making a Good First Impression
Firstly, there are a few tasks that all good corporate home pages must perform. In order to foster communication, home pages have to instill visitor confidence by answering basic questions. Consumers who’d like to interact with your firm want to get to know you better before building a relationship. Your homepage needs to give them an impression of what you’re all about the instant it appears.
Visitors are quick to judge organizations based on how well their websites answer common questions, such as what products a company specializes in or what geographic regions it serves. They also put great stock in the way websites look. Clean, professional portals that encourage interaction by using obvious links, simple color schemes, professional fonts and uncomplicated menus are the best.
Balancing Content
While it may seem tempting to create a gateway page that is loaded down with information, avoid doing so at all costs. Remember, the same rules that apply to text-based advertisements apply to online content. People shy away from long paragraphs and convoluted reading material.
Although your website does need to incorporate documentation, legal notices and other text-heavy information, these things have no place on the front page. Instead, a high-quality homepage attracts attention with vibrant images and media content, such as downloads, new product ads and job photos.
Minimal homepage text is fine, but it shouldn’t go into much detail. Focus on prominently establishing your brand and any applicable slogans. All other homepage text needs to present users with navigation aids or clear value statements. These propositions ought to entice the user into further interaction by pointing out the benefits your firm provides. In doing so, they’ll give visitors incentive to navigate further into your portal.
Tying It All Together
Remember, your corporate homepage is like an office lobby. If visitors are scared away by tacky or shabby-looking decor, they won’t stick around long enough to see what you’ve got in the other showrooms, no matter how appealing you tell them it is.
Evaluate your homepage, and ask yourself whether it establishes a unifying theme. If so, does that theme clearly reflect the image you’d like your firm to portray? If not, take time to reengineer your website around a professional homepage whose aesthetics actually further positive interaction. Doing so might just be the key to drumming up the Internet business you need to expand.
