5 Homepage Facts
10 August 2008
Here are some facts about your website homepage, and what it means for you.
Obvious Fact 1. About a third of your visitors will leave your site without ever venturing further than your homepage.
What this means for you:
Your homepage needs to not only capture the attention of your target audience, but draw them onwards to explore other strategically written and crafted content on your site.
Obvious Fact 2. First impressions (and hence subconscious judgements about you and your business) are made within a matter of seconds.
What this means for you:
Having a website that looks dated or doesn’t immediately convey your message to your visitor is like wearing boardies and thongs to a meeting. Unless that’s the image you want to project, don’t do it.
Obvious Fact 3. No one reads your text.
What this means for you:
The less written content on your homepage, the better. Delivering textual information in bite sized pieces and doing it gracefully is the key.
Obvious Fact 4. It’s about them, not you.
What this means for you:
Today, it’s all about me me me. It’s easy to think about what ‘I’ want. I want a blue banner. I want a bigger logo. I want the font smaller.
Stop. Think about what your clients or customers want. Do they really give a damn if your banner is ice blue or sky blue? They want to know how much your product costs, where to buy it and why it’s better and if you don’t give them that, they’ll move on to the hundreds of other options available to them, regardless if your banner looks the right blue.
Obvious Fact 5. Most websites look like crap.
What this means for you:
Seriously. As proof, search any business type on yellow or google, and look at the first 5 results you get. I guarantee you the majority of them look like they were designed in the 90’s.
Which means it’s actually quite easy to stand out. All it takes is some initiative and some idea of what you want your website to do.
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Bluewire Media, on 23 November 2008 said:
Great points – I agree with you!
Also, did you know? … that according to Google, on average, 50% of users bounce of a website within 8 secs.
And that users only read the first three (3) words of any sentence.
Not much time to get your message across is it?