So That's What Goes On A Home Page!
Author: Marcia Yudkin

In the early days of the World Wide Web, the word went around
that the thing to do on a home page is to heartily and
sincerely welcome the visitor. Today, this is unnecessary,
cliched and ineffective. Instead, an effective home page needs
to quickly orient the visitor to what the business or
professional practice offers, distinguish these offerings from
competitors' and direct the web site visitor what to do if they
are interested in learning more.

It's especially important to make a strong and clear
presentation on the home page if you want perfect strangers
coming from a search engine to spend more than 10 seconds on
the site when determining whether or not it is relevant to
them. Getting business from such strangers is one of the major
payoffs of having a web site, and they lack the patience of
someone who has already had contact with you or been referred
by a trusted source. Even people seriously inclined to hire you
don't have endless patience to wade through hot air, jargon or
superfluous preliminaries.

Therefore, a home page must make it possible to answer these
questions within 10 seconds:

* What is being described or sold here? What kind of business
is this?
* Why should I do business with this company rather than its
competitors?
* What should I do to find out more or get in touch?

In judging web sites for the Webby Awards, I have seen as many
rich, large companies as small ones overlook the first
essential for a home page - set the context. Orient the
visitor. The perfect stranger may need to know things that you
assume everyone already knows, such as:

1. What business are you in? Include a commonly understood
industry name or the generic name of your primary product or
service prominently in the home page copy, if it's not already
part of your business name or in the tag line. When this
information isn't plainly and obviously stated, many visitors
are screaming to themselves, "What IS this?" as they hit the
back button on their browsers.

2. Who do you serve? So many businesses - banks, restaurants,
dentists - leave it unspoken what state or province and even
what country they are in when that's essential to someone
figuring out whether or not this business meets their needs.
When location plays a crucial role in service, make it
unmistakable where the business is. Other times, the answer to
this question is more subtle. You need to indicate that you
work with Fortune 500 companies, or mostly with authors, or
with ambitious fitness professionals and health club owners.

3. Why should someone do business with you? The best kind of
answer to this question involves presenting the benefits
someone gets from buying your products or services. Indeed, I
recommend putting such benefits right in your home page
headline. For instance, for a caregiving support site I created
this headline: With Support, Caregiving Becomes a Rewarding
Journey. For a site about a book on outstanding women
scientists and artists, the headline read: Learn From
Accomplished Women Role Models How to Create a Fulfilling
Lifelong Career. Note the inviting tone of these headlines.
Within the paragraphs of the home page copy, refer again and
again to what customers get and what makes you different from
competitors.

4. What should I do next? Even though you provide navigation
links for people to choose where to go next at the site, it's
effective to say explicitly what someone with such and such an
interest should do. Your call to action might have more than
one part, such as: To learn more about how Hyana Heights Club
helps you stay healthy and fit, click here. To book your free
tour and complimentary aerobics class, click here.

Use these guidelines to create or redo a home page, and you'll
enjoy a significantly improved response from your web site both
from people landing on your site from search engines and those
already somewhat interested in what you offer. There's much
more involved in turning web site visitors into customers, but
you'll certainly thereby have laid the groundwork for a
reasonable return on your web site investment.


About The Author: Marcia Yudkin (marcia@yudkin.com) has helped
judge the Webby Awards for 6 years, as well as the Inc.
Magazine Small Business Web Awards. The author of Web Site
Marketing Makeover and 10 other books, she performs web site
reviews, web site makeovers and creates new marketing-smart web
sites. Sample home page makeover: http://yudkin.com/sample8b.htm