A bright, shiny new business website is an essential tool for building your brand, but you also need to fill it with content. The homepage is basically your online shop front, in that it offers a visitor their first impression of your business, so you have to make a good one.
There are a number of essential items you should include on your business website homepage to tell a user exactly what you do, entice them to find out more, and encourage them to interact with you. Here are the things every homepage needs:
1) Logo and Tagline
Logos and taglines are usually placed at the top left of a business website homepage. This is the first place that a user’s eye concentrates on when the page is loaded and gives them an immediate idea of what to expect.
If you don’t already have a powerful, striking logo, you need to get one. It is a representation of your unique brand and there are a number of companies online who can design one for you. If you are confident in your design abilities, you can create your own logo on a free program like Canva.
The tagline is also important. This needs to be a pithy statement that tells people what you do and why they need to use your products or services. This is your chance to pitch to prospective customers as soon as they hit your business website.
2) Clear Navigation
Once you have people on your site, you want them to look around. Google uses ‘bounce rate’ as one of the factors to decide how high you rank for your keywords. If it sees people find your site but immediately hit the ‘Back’ button to leave, it assumes that your website doesn’t have satisfactory answers to their questions.
However, the real problem might not be that your site didn’t contain the information, it could be instead that the user just couldn’t find the next page they wanted to visit. This is why you need a clear, uncluttered menu on your homepage, directing visitors to the most popular secondary pages. These usually include the About Us page, the Contact page and pages on which they can buy what it is you are offering.
Obviously, different companies will have slightly different priorities for where they steer their users from the homepage.
3) Social Media Icons
Although many customers do make use of the Contact page on your site, a large number of potential clients like to suss out your business and ask questions through social media. Make sure you have icons representing your social accounts in your header and/or footer, linking users to your space on each of those sites.
4) Contact Details
You simply can’t tell people often enough how to get in contact with you. The Contact page itself contains all of your methods of communication in more detail, but your homepage (and the rest of the pages on your site) should also feature your location, email address and phone number in the footer in order to encourage users to take the next step.
5) Call to Action
The idea of your small business website is to create leads and bring in more custom. You need to decide on the best method to gain those leads and then build a couple of calls to action around it. These should point to different stages of the buying process so you can potentially pick up custom from all visitors, whether they are new to your company or returning.
For example, if you want them to sign up for a newsletter, use a box for them to fill in their contact details and feature a button in a striking colour beneath that says ‘Sign Up’. Keep the calls to action simple and direct – ‘Request a Quote’, ‘Buy Now’ or something similar.
6) Strong Images
We are a visual species and we respond favourably to pictures and videos on small business website homepages. Choose relevant images for your business to make your site look enticing. They might be shots of your products, your staff performing the services or something else.
Videos work well too, although you need to remember to make sure the file size isn’t so big it slows down the site.
Other Items for Your Business Website Homepage
Once you have the essentials sorted, you might want to add a few more pieces of information to your business website homepage. If you have testimonials, it is impressive to new users to see snippets of them on the homepage, with links through to read the full review.
You could also show off your awards and commendations on your homepage, as well as snippets of information about what you offer. Some companies feature a list of blog posts, with a few teaser lines about their content, which is a great way of keeping people on your site.
Get Your Business Website
If you don’t have the perfect looking small business website yet, Delton Digital offers some fantastic packages to launch your company online with a bang. Visit our Web Development page now for more details.
