The Digital Bridges Technology, Apps, Gadgets, Media and More
Your home page is important for a number of reasons. First and foremost is the fact that it is often a visitor’s first interaction with your brand, and therefore your first opportunity to make an impression – and you want it to wow. In addition, however, it generally acts as your landing page, or the place visitors end up when they click a hyperlink from Google desktop or another search engine and get redirected to your site.
These are customers that are looking for you, for one reason or another, and you don’t want to disappoint. This means that the design of your page has to be flawless. It must be pointed, easy to navigate, and engaging. You’ll have to provide an appropriate layout, an appealing aesthetic, and engaging content in order to ensure that whoever makes their way to your site is compelled to stay and look around, at the very least. In short, you home/landing page is incredibly important since it acts as the hub of your virtual network. Here are just a few dos and don’ts that should help to ensure you create the right experience for prospective customers via your landing page, whether you are creating an internet banking site or new social media platform.
DO:
Brand Your Landing Page
If your home page is your landing page, you likely already have branding in place thanks to a logo and other distinctive on site SEO and design elements. But any page that you end up using for this purpose needs to be appropriately branded, so that visitors who ride in on a link know exactly whose website they’re viewing.
Follow Accepted Layout Guidelines
Web users have come to expect a particular sort of layout that includes buttons, bars, and boxes in a standard sort of layout. So don’t get all avant-garde with your layout unless you want to alienate viewers that have the attention span of a hyperactive squirrel. And for goodness sake, don’t go crazy with colored backgrounds and text. You don’t want your site to look like amateur hour.
Use Color
For an effective landing page design, you are going to want to make proper use of color. Certain colors convey certain emotions both in digital art and website design. This is crucial to remember when designing a landing page. Purple, for example, is a calm and soothing color that is perfect for beauty related pages. Green, on the other hand, is associated with money and wealth. It is also the easiest for the eye to process. Make sure you use color effectively to convey your brand and messaging.
Add Social Links
If visitors like your page you want them to have easy access to social means of liking, sharing, and following your feeds. So make sure to provide buttons for Facebook, Twitter, RSS, and more. Include links to the most popular social media websites so that you can increase your reach with your landing page design.
Keep It Simple
A landing page needs to be simple for all your ICANN domain names, so as not to overwhelm your reader. Pick one particular action that you want your visitors to engage in and focus on that. Pick two or three colors max and keep details short to engage your viewer.
Make Your Offer Clear
Additionally, your offer on your landing page needs to be clear. When consumers visit websites and get confused as to what their call-to-action button means, they will avoid pressing it. More so, they will likely leave the site completely. To avoid such an outcome, make your call-to-action buttons as straightforward as possible. Use phrases like “Join to Download” and “Pick Up Here”. Then, you will boost your conversions with a great landing page design. Consider reviewing the top on site SEO mistakes to avoid to increase your conversions even more.
DON’T:
Distract Visitors With Stuff
A clean design is going to appeal to the largest segment of the consumer public. And while certain subgroups may prefer visual chaos, cluttering up your website with text, graphics and videos may only serve to distract viewers. This will undermine your efforts to convey a message. Make sure not to do this after purchasing your domain from Afternic.
Push Too Much Content
Updating content and setting the bar high for quality are both essential factors when it comes to engaging customers. Many professionals struggle with content when they start a blog or ecommerce site. But too much of a good thing can be problematic. Most readers have a relatively short attention span, so keep content concise, relevant, and entertaining so that you can deliver your message quickly and effectively.
Limit Yourself To One Landing Page
It’s certainly easier to make your home page the landing page for every link you put out there, but you don’t rely on one form of outreach – you use directory software, SEO, and social media, amongst other things, to raise brand awareness. So why would you limit the scope of your incoming traffic to the contents of one page? Tailoring your landing pages to suit your links could end up delivering a boost in conversions, sales, and repeat customers.
