The homepage is a website’s first page, very much like a book cover. When we say, “the first impression is the last impression”, we mean, something which we see at the very first glance keeps its long-lasting impact in our minds. So, we can easily understand how important it is to keep the very index page of our websites attractive, interactive, as also, visitor-friendly. In this article, we are about to share a few of our best tips on how to effectively design your website’s very first page.
Seldom do the visitors go through each and every word on a website’s homepage. Most of them usually scan the page, pick out the top keywords or the inner page links and sentences they are looking for, and move on.
Keeping this general behaviour in mind, it would be wise for you to appeal to emotions rather than number of words. The lesser a visitor who has come to your site has to read things, click on, or remember, the better he/she will be able to process and judge, what is going on in front of him/her. This will increase the probability higher for your visitors to do what you expected them to do.
When a visitor comes to your site, you only have very little time to have his/her attention in order to let them know what your website is about. In this context, if your site displays a distinct hierarchy to all the information on your website, then your visitors are more likely to unknowingly follow the bait you have left for them behind.
You should also pay attention in using colours, contrasting elements, size of images and fonts, as well as spacing for accentuating it further. For instance, one of the best elements to design modern-day websites is creating strips that establish a strong visual hierarchy. Such tactfully used elements will not only make your site visually impressive, but also help in organizing your site, eventually keeping it user-friendly to your targeted visitors.
‘Readability’ defines the parameter of easiness of recognizing fonts (words), phrases, as well as sentences. When we say that the readability of a web page is ‘high’, it means that the site visitors can effectively read and understand all the written elements that you have used. Thus, your front page or homepage should be properly ‘readable’, in the first place, so as to create a visual parity between your visitors’ eyes and brains.
For example, there should be a logical contrast between the text colour and the colour used as its background so as to keep the text visibly clear.On an average, users keep their PCs some two feet away from their eyes. Hence, if the font that you have used in your homepage is considerably small, face, they might end up struggling to read them.
As a typical standard, body texts are usually kept to at least 16pt. Also remember that, calls to action and texts are certainly necessary; however, you should also consider breaking them up in paragraphs, using larger subheadings in order to ensure a visual relief for the readers.
Though designing your own website is your independent wish, you should make sure that, while experimenting with the navigation from the homepage, you are not making it difficult for your visitors to wander from one place to another.
Apart from improving the viewers’ experience, a homepage with a visitor-friendly navigation also allows the top search engines like Google to get your content indexed at ease.
Now that we are living in a mobile society studded with smartphones, it becomes important to consider what the visitors to my website see when they visit my site through their smart devices like mobile phones, tabs, etc.?
We all know that a considerable percentage of online visitors are hitting millions of websites through smartphones every day, and hence, it has become important to use the mobile-friendly technology while designing a website. For this topic, you can go through our other articles on how to design a mobile-friendly website or what is its relevance in the modern day.