Your business website homepage is the window to your brand online
3rd July, 2009 by Alick
In the third of our blog posts explaining miggle’s website fundamentals, we take you through our thinking on the importance of a website homepage in establishing your online brand and inspiring trust in your users.
Express yourself
If your business already has a strong offline brand, keep online life simple for both your business and your users and maintain consistency within all your promotional activities. It may be tempting when you think about site design to go for a hot new look, but a radically different ‘epersonality’ could hinder rather than help your business. Think carefully before letting your web designer take you off on a path which diverges too much from your existing identity.
Don’t be seduced by flashy effects
Animation rich sites may create a powerful first impression, but return users to your site will just want to be able to get to the pages they need quickly and easily. Your site exists to do a good job for your business and customers, its primary function is not to add diversity to your design team’s portfolio. Remember, the amount of time a customer will spend on your site versus the other sites they use online is minimal – so don’t make them have to work hard to get what they want by making things more confusing than they need to be. And definitely don’t make them have to download any special plug-ins to view the page. Inexperienced users won’t know how, experienced users are likely not to bother. With e-commerce businesses remember people shop online to save time as well as money. Think of your homepage as a haven for users – a reassuring place where it’s easy to find exactly the information needed.
Demonstrate openness
Your homepage should provide easy access to an ‘about us’ section with detailed information on the business, online portfolios / examples of your work and profiles of staff members – all these aspects indicate transparency and openness and can help give your business that ‘human touch’. If you are running an e-commerce business, easy links to returns policies and customer care are also important.
Provide valuable content
A site that reads as a business card or promotional pamphlet gives users little reason to revisit. Thinking about how you can offer advice, tips, news or promotional offers will keep you homepage fresh.
Think carefully about advertising
If you are going to accept any kind of advertising or sponsorship online think first about how the appearance of other brands along side you own will effect customers perceptions of your business. Good advertisers/sponsors will provide good mutual brand association, poor ones will diminish it.
Based in Brighton and Hove, East Sussex, contact miggle.co.uk for website development, content management and online media services in the UK and worldwide.
July 10th, 2009 at 9:12 am
The landing page as you rightly point out needs to be fresh friendly and have easy navigation. Keep it simple, avoid to much flash and animation and of course be transparent.