Elements of a Well-Designed Home Page

Okay, you've finally made it. Your web-site is or at least the home page is ready. We shall discuss here essential items your home page should have as home page is the most important page in your whole site. A visitor (and potential customer) who reaches your site for the first time, will decide inside of 30 seconds whether to read on or press the stop button.

If you or your designer is new in web design, resist the temptation to spring surprise on unsuspecting visitors ! Remember, you are designing a business site and the visitor is looking for something useful. Think yourself as a visitor and choose content accordingly.

A well-designed home page has the following characteristics:

1. It provides an overview of what is available on the site, and every section of the site can be reached from the home page, either directly or with no more than 2 or 3 clicks.



2. It looks attractive and projects the right image for the company, but it still loads in a reasonably short amount of time. A balance must be reached between whizzy graphics and fast page loading.



3. It reinforces the branding of the company or product, so visitors instantly know what site they have landed on.



4. It shares certain elements with all the other pages of the site, so that the pages all fit together, and visitors get a sense of the pages belonging to one site, rather than being a bunch of unrelated pages.



5. A home page usually includes a small amount of content, even if only a brief description of the company, but its main purpose is as a list of links to other pages where the real content resides. A home page is much like the table of contents in a book or magazine.

Most business home pages will have the following links:

• About the Company
• Our Products and Services
• How to Contact Us

Order Here !
The fewer clicks required to get to your ordering page, the more orders you are likely to get - it's a statistical fact. Put your ordering page one click away from the home page (and perhaps from every other page as well). Actually, it's probably better to call the link "How to Order" or some such, and make it clear to the user that they have not committed themselves to ordering anything until the credit card number is submitted. A well-designed site offers the following no-pressure button:

Add to Shopping Cart (You can always remove it later)

Most sites, of course, will have more than the above-mentioned four navigational items on their home page. What you have there depends on the purpose of your site. Whatever's important, whatever you want people to see, should be right there, not buried several levels down.

Resist the temptation to give your navigational titles clever but ambiguous names. Of course you don't have to stick to the plain vanilla examples above.

• Who We Are
• What We Do
• Where to Find Us

The purpose of your site is to provide information, not to entertain with word games. So, choose your content with care - not everything you like. That approach is OK for personal home page - not in business sites.

Do your users a favor and make it clear what they'll get when they click on a link. If your site features downloadable files, audio or video links, or other bandwidth hogs, list the file size next to each link so users will know what they're getting into. Inform.