Web Design
GUIDE

Home Page Design

Description: The home page of your website acts as a gateway to the rest of your website. There is a huge importance for it to do its job effectively if visitors are going to be inspired to go any further and explore any more.

If half of the challenge of having a website is getting people to find it, the other half has to be getting them to go further than your home page. That's why it's so important that your home page design doesn't let your site down.

It doesn't matter how wonderful the rest of your site is if your home page doesn't inspire and encourage people to explore what your site is all about. For this reason it is vital that several clear messages are conveyed as soon as someone sees your home page for the first time, and these messages need to be conveyed during the design process to ensure the best possible results are obtained.

The first and most important aspect of your home page design is that it should tell the visitor clearly what the site is about. You can do this through text, images, color, logos and branding - and ideally a balanced combination of all of them.

You should also incorporate clear navigation into your home page design, to enable visitors to see at a glance what else the site contains, and how it's divided up into clear sections. It also doesn't do any harm whatsoever to come up with a slogan or single sentence that describes the whole purpose of your site, as that will get interest from the search engines as well as explaining to people why you're there.

This brings up another interesting point - the question of designing your home page to appeal to the search engines. While it is vital that you put your customers at the top of your list when you are designing an appealing site, a lot of those customers will find you for the first time via a search engine. So make sure the design of your page incorporates keywords and search terms that identify your site and its purpose.

Finally, bear in mind that when a page loads on someone's computer, they will only see the section which is ?above the fold'. This is the part they can happily read without having to do any scrolling to see what else the page contains. Don't assume everyone will want to scroll down. Make sure the most important information appears first.