How to Design a Great Website Home page
17th April, 2021
By Elliot McHugh
There are many elements which make a great homepage. Often, agencies will take a minimalist approach and focus on having a few nice images or blocks of text arranged in an easy-to-read format.
This article digests some of the top tips and tricks you can use so that your homepage is not only pretty, but converts web visitors into customers!
- Clarity is everything
In web design, clarity is extremely important. By clarity, we mean that, on your site, it should be immediately clear the service or product you offer when a user enters the site. For example, if you sell pet supplies, you may opt for: ‘top pet supply services UK’ in your heading. Make the text stand out on screen and keep it central to focus the eyes.
When scrolling down the page, sections should be clearly labelled and not too cluttered. Use images to break up the text and break with regular paragraphs to make content easier to read. You can install the free Yoast SEO plugin for a readability score which marks your page base don how ‘readable’ it is to the end-user.
2. Great images make great sites
Great images are crucial for dictating the overall ‘feel’ of a website. If you’re a web design company, you may wish to include HD digital marketing or laptop pictures to set the tone of the website – it’s often easy to find these pictures on sites like Canva.com. One thing to note is that high quality images (e.g. 10MB and above) can sometimes result in slow page load times, so make sure you compress all of your images using free plugins like ‘Smush’ or Robin Craft’s ‘image optimiser’ plugin on WordPress.
3. Call to actions are your friend
Call to actions are a fantastic way to increase conversions on your website. By regularly breaking up content with buttons, contact forms, and email addresses, you encourage the site user to interact with your content. This can help to reduce your bounce rate (people leaving your page after clicking), which can in turn help increases organic leads. Don’t make your call to actions overly boisterous though – stick to 7-8 per page and well-spaced out from the content itself.
4. Brand colours are a must
There’s nothing worse than landing on a page which is totally un-colour coordinated. Make sure that your brand’s identity is memorable with vivid, bright colours. Some websites use a change of colour on hover or specific colour combination on the nav menu. Strike the balance between each colour and give your brand an identity that threads throughout your website.
5. Content is king
Ultimately, having user friendly, interesting content on your homepage which engages and entices the user is critical, both for SEO purposes, and for increasing conversions on your website. Focus on putting together quality written text to support your high quality, professional stock images sitewide.
A great tool is Yoast SEO plugin which helps to format and analyse your content so that it is fit for search engines. The best companies are the ones that focus on quality content over quantity on a page.
And that’s all – top tips for homepage web design. If you need support designing and building a website, get in touch with our team on info@ejmwebdesign.co.uk for more details.
