Common Website Mistakes 8: Battle for the Home Page

The home page is the most important and most central point in all websites. This is often the first touch point every potential customer, candidate, and investor will have with your company or service, so its importance cannot be overestimated. Let us take a look at some common suggestions for what should be here.

Best practices: What should be on your home page?

If you do some online research, you will find a lot of strong opinions about what should be on your home page. Common examples are an emotional banner, a tagline and value proposition, some sort of main navigation, and at least one call-to-action. These are obviously some best practices, so why do many of the most popular websites look totally different?

The Disillusion

The most infamous answer strikes again: It depends. The listed websites and responsible companies are so popular that they do not have to explain what they do. They are known for their service, so naturally that service takes precedence over any kind of introduction. This makes sense: Once your service has established a sizable user base, convenience should be the biggest concern. Chances are you have not reached that point, so let's take a look at some of the aspects that can influence your homepage design.

Industry

Is your industry conservative or progressive? How are buying decisions influenced in this environment? A home page of a bank will naturally look very different from that of a mobile game development company.

Product or Service

Is your company providing a service or a product? Is it intended for end customers (B2C) or other companies (B2B)? The presentation style of information is very different for those cases.

Returning or New Customers

Are the majority of your website visits from returning customers? In this case you might want to provide more varying content than Who we are and What we do.

Audience Qualification

Are you selling something for a broad audience or a highly specialized individuals? The latter might prefer a more in-depth view of your offering and specific product differentiators, in contrast to a more appealing presentation of generic content.

The Battle Within

All of these aspects have not even considered the most important issue for larger companies: Internal conflicts. So far we simply assumed that a company is aligned on the purpose of the homepage and that the relevance of content can simply be determined. In reality, there is often controversy about what should appear on the website, let alone on the homepage. Multiple departments fight for the most prominent spots, often leading to inconsistent and overloaded home pages.

What you can do

Measure, Measure, Measure

The first thing you need is measurement. Not only is this the best way to understand your visitors, it is also crucial to evaluate the impact of any changes. Changing your website without knowing the results is nothing short of gambling. In addition, having robust measurement can support the arguments for your content in case disputes emerge.

Enable Yourself

Measuring is useless without the ability to change, it is hence important that you can modify the content. You want to conduct experiments with small changes and measure their impact on user behavior. If an experiment is unsuccessful, it should be easy to roll it back without too much impact on your business.

Personalization

The crown of content delivery is personalization. Every visitor is different, so showing everyone the same content is less than ideal. Personalization requires a high maturity of your solution, but it yields the highest benefit. A good point to start is to differentiate the content for new versus returning visitors. A first-time visitor probably wants to know what your company generally does, while a returning visitor is more interested in the latest news and offers.

What do you think?

Do you agree? Did you experience situations where printing culture slowed down your publication process? Is this article helpful and would you enjoy similar content? Let me know in the comments.

Aknowledgements

Photo by Arisa Chattasa on Unsplash