Every page should have a purpose, mean, every single page you design needs to be in line with a conversion goal otherwise, the effort just goes wasted, from the marketers’ point of view of course.
Now, this is an uphill battle for every designer, as we all struggle to maintain a fine balance between creativity and marketing perspective.
Since the clients want to do business from a website, you need to be double sure that each page has a clearly defined goal.
However, defining a goal is not that difficult when it comes to the internal pages of a website, but when you are to define the goal of the home page of a website, you will find yourself struggling like anything else.
Still missing the point. Take it this way – when a visitor lands on the home page, what you want the visitor do next.
Will he go straight into the contact us page and the lead is generated? Or else, do you want him to visit some internal pages, digging down more details before making the purchase? Tough call indeed, but you have to make the choice.
And this is exactly where most designers fumble. They fail to figure out where to put the focus and then mix up the goals in the form of too many graphical elements and the result is another pathetically overcrowded home page with little attention to better users’ experience.
You would definitely not like it to happen right? Of course, you are not interested in this, so here I am going to share some tips that would make your homepage look less crowded:
Set Up the Goal
Before you start off the designing process, you need to make sure that the home page has a clearly defined goal.
But the problem is that most of the clients that you will meet along the way do not have any clear idea of what they want to achieve on their home page.
Everything is vague and as a result, you try to achieve too many things in the home and eventually it achieves nothing and thus finally enters into the league of extraordinary losers.
Now, you do not need to feel despondent. Just chill out and arrange a meeting with your client and make them see reason. Try to figure out what they are trying to achieve from the website.
I hope you will be able to draw out some information about their goals and all that even if the client is clueless about it. Either he is after the brand image, leads, or sales.
So fine-tune your design in accordance with that. Do not add too many bells and whistles around the Call to action thing because this will only add to more visual distractions.
It is not a great practice to add a short snippet from the body content, blog posts, or from services pages, rather you should be focusing more on one single element that is most likely to trigger conversion.
Keep the number of call to action to a sensible limit
When you put too many options before your targeted readers, you are making them confused. It is proved that when you are offering more than two options, people are less likely to make any decision.
So, pruning the number of options is certainly a great way to ensure that you are going to see a steady uptick in the number of business leads.
It makes sense to keep the number of calls to action to a logical number. Having too many “Call to action” texts is going to spoil the broth.
Though the Home page sometimes is a matter of do or die thing for some websites, still concerted attempt should be made to make sure that you are helping visitors to get convert and not the other way around.
This is a usual problem with newspaper website since there are too many elements and call to action texts in the above fold sections.
It is confusing to the core where to click or where to start. However, this is a win-win situation for newspaper sites as they do not have to sell anything to make a living. But eCommerce sites are those who find it really tough to make the dice rolling.
Since they have to sell products, they cannot rule out the options of featuring two or three Call to Action and this is exactly where the problem creeps in.
My honest opinion is to use one main call to action and other less prominent Call to actions that do not draw that much eyeballs.
Online Salesperson
Most of the websites sell something. And this is to happen, you need to make necessary changes in the design. If the main purpose of the website is to sell, you should make the design look like a real-world salesperson.
However, you need to have some basic information about the project in question. You need to know whether they are selling to the end-users or acting as an intermediary. Have a detailed discussion about the selling techniques with the customers in question and you will have a better world to live.
If they have a single product to sell, just show it on the home page. Apple is great in this art. They use a big and awesome image of their products on the landing page and this is what acts as a game-changer.
Hope that now you have a fair idea of what you should do and what you should not do as to make the home page clutter-free yet without giving less attention to the Call to Action thing.
