Your homepage is your online storefront. However, it is possible that your homepage is being judged more harshly than a brick and mortar storefront. Even brick and mortar stores understand and appreciate the value of a fresh new look to their storefronts and windows on a regular basis. So should you, the online business owner. You need to constantly update your site and your homepage. Add fresh content, new features, aesthetic designs, seamless navigation, and enable it to function on all kinds of devices. Sprucing up your homepage increases your chances of getting better conversions, more revenue, and a wider, larger audience.
Ways to Spruce Up Your Homepage
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Use Sub-Navigation Menus And Internal Links
Sub-navigation menus are used to display items that are an extension of the main navigation menu. Sub-navigation menus are typically in the form of a drop-down menu from the main menu. They provide your site’s visitors with additional and more detailed information without cluttering up your homepage.
For example, your site is all about books. On the main navigation menu, you have the tags of Young Adult, Children’s books, and Adult fiction. When you click on Young Adult, a sub-navigation menu will show the genres of Romance, Historical, Paranormal, and so on and so forth.
Or your site could be about weddings. The main menu could be Wedding Venues. Hovering on that navigation menu would show the sub-navigation menu that includes Beaches, Castles, Chapels, and so on.
Internal links are links that visitors use to move to other pages of your website. These links could be click-able images, embedded hyperlinks, etc. Incorporating these into your homepage makes navigating your site easier, while still maintaining its clean, professional look.
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Use Clear And Easy Navigation
The wording of your navigation links should be clear and easy to follow, or you will lose customers for have gotten frustrated because they do not understand what they are supposed to do or what to click to go where.
The directions for navigating your site should be made clear so that visitors will not have any problems going about on your site and looking at what products or services you have to offer.
One great idea is to use clickable images, which are effortless to understand. For example, if your site is all about selling clothing, you can put clickable images of a dress and shoes, showing that clicking that image will take one to the Women’s Fashion; or an image of sunglasses and swimsuits, which will tell visitors that clicking on that image will take them to Beach Apparel.
Even without words, or as few words as possible, your site navigation should be simple and very easy to understand.
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Ensure There Is Relevant Content On Your Homepage
The importance of content cannot be over-emphasized. If you are not confident in your content writing skills, hire a professional content writer. Your content, depending on what type it is, should be relevant to your business, website, and niche. It should be informative to your visitors and should be able to capture their attention long enough to convince them to browse through the rest of your site.
Whether it is product descriptions, testimonials, product reviews, or just general information on the weather and what is going on with the business, it all needs to be well written, useful to the visitors or customers, clever, and straightforward.
Do not overwhelm your homepage with content, and neither should you write one-liners and leave them there. Do not make your homepage one huge sales pitch about why they should buy from you. Neither should you write scathing reviews about the competition. Write about what your target audience needs to see.
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Place Offers, Sales, And Discounts On Your Homepage
If you are doing a sale, giving limited-time offers, or selling products at huge discounts because it is a feature season, they should all appear on the homepage. It is the first page that visitors see when they come to your site. What they see on that page decides whether they should continue browsing through the site or leave.
If a first-time customer comes to your site and sees that there are huge discounts on all seven Harry Potter books (and secretly they are die-hard Potter fans), do you think they would leave your site for something else? No, they will stay. And they will continue to read through all the other sales and promotions you are doing. Just like that, you have a new customer.
All relevant information about what you are doing in your company that may interest the customers should be displayed on the homepage, to attract new customers and get current customers to have first dibs on limited-time offers.
You can build on these tips to spruce up your homepage for better conversions and revenue. However, sprucing up your homepage would work well only if you have done that with your customers in mind.
Designing your homepage based on what you think they want is different from designing it based on what you know your want. By studying your target audience, looking at their browsing and buying patterns, and getting personal with them by asking them questions and listening to their responses, you can tell what your customers need from you. Most of all, you should make every attempt to deliver on that.
Recommending everyone do sales, offers and discounts is not good business. If your brand is to be a luxury brand you cannot offer such things or you will end up like every dept store. Out of business.
Hey Jack,
You raise a good point. However, we’re not recommending perpetual sales, just that if you are running a sale, to maximise the effect of that you should place it front and centre :) There’s no point running a sale if no one knows about it!
Hope this helps clear it up!