Tips From A Web Designer Company — Forget the Homepage!
Visiting a homepage, loving the design, and then immediately investing in the brand is a rare phenomenon — and old-school thinking. New users hit your site running, ready to delve into the information they really want.
If you don’t deliver, all the eye-catching visuals in the world won’t prevent them from moving on.
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What Doesn’t Matter
More than half of your visitors spend less than 15 seconds on your website (source). That is it! Fifteen seconds to convince them that you’re worth their time.
The new user doesn’t care about your logo or your brand colours — at least not yet. They have no reason to when you were likely one of 100 similar businesses that resulted from a Google search. You have to earn their interest, their time, and their investment through providing them real value.
Your content is what invites them to stay beyond that fifteen seconds, be it through engaging blog articles, resources, case studies or your service areas (read more: Why case studies convert).
In reality, a large logo, flashy navigation bar, or fancy slider banner are nothing more than an obstacle in the way of them finding value in your content. Don’t design a distraction! The longer they spend looking at shiny objects, the less time might be left for your convincing content before they bounce.
This is why my design style leans toward simple and purposeful (while still being attractive and delightful). Every moment with your audience counts — we don’t waste even a millisecond.
The homepage, and specifically the homepage banner, offer little to a visitor. Immediately scrolling down after hitting a homepage has become a learned behaviour; we all do it, and you should plan for it.
It’s unfortunate when clients insist on hours and hours and rounds of revisions trying to make their logo “pop” in the navigation bar. I know from experience that this effort will go to waste.
While it might seem like your showpiece and make your team members proud, the bottom line is that it drives no value for your audience.
In the Forge and Smith process, we use the homepage design to set the mood and tone for the visuals of the rest of the site.
What Really Happens
The reality of social search is that most people won’t find your business and land on the homepage. Many visitors will come via a shared blog, social media links, or other site pages that came up in a Google search result. These users don’t even see your homepage.
Don’t worry — once you have an invested user spending more than fifteen seconds on your site and are ready to invest, they’ll look for your logo on the subpage they’re currently reading.
What Really Matters
While a homepage does have value, the rest of the site is where most attention should be focused. I’m not just talking about the design process here; the long term digital strategy for your website should also focus on maintaining, updating and adding content site-wide.
All of that good stuff I mentioned, like articles and case studies, is on your sub-pages. This is the true value to your audience.
Important decisions and, more importantly, conversions are made on sub pages. That’s phone calls to your business, requests for more information, subscriptions to email lists… it all happens off of your homepage.
Give your site’s interior pages the thought and attention to detail they deserve. As content is what matters most, how that content is displayed is extremely important. Things like heading hierarchy, indents, bullets, and styling your blog articles correctly can make or break a conversion. Well-crafted typography, white space and interesting visuals to house your content are what Forge and Smith provides for our clients.
Your homepage isn’t the book cover — it’s the table of contents. It barely touches the surface of your visitors’ online experience, so stop overthinking it and direct that focus to the pages that matter most.
Want to know what goes into the complete Forge and Smith design and strategy process? Check it out!
