We’ve all visited websites that just seem to draw us in and want to stay. We have all seen others that make us want to leave, even before we’ve given them the opportunity to tell us what they have to offer. What is the difference between the two?
Let’s take the example of two websites that sell cookbooks and see how one might go about selling them the right way and the other the wrong way. Once you break it down into its separate components, it’s easy to see what makes one website work and another one fail.
Cookbooks are a good example because there are so many of them, although it’s a specialized niche. You can find cookbooks for every conceivable type of cuisine or diet. When a person goes to a cookbook website, especially if it’s their first visit, they are not going to want to waste their time browsing for the one they want.
A good webmaster knows this. His homepage is going to be light on text. It is going to get to the point within a couple of short paragraphs. He wants the readers to be drawn immediately to the cookbook they’re looking for, so the emphasis on the homepage will be on the index.
His index will be clearly marked, so that within one or two clicks of the mouse, the reader can find what they’re looking for. One visitor will be looking for Mexican food, while another will be looking for cake decorating books. On the homepage, any visitor knows that if they are looking for regional cuisine, they will find it on a tab that says, ‘World Cuisine.’ If they are looking for books about cakes, they’ll find them under a tab that directs them to ‘Mouthwatering Desserts’.
You are not going to stay for long at a website that offers too much, too soon on the homepage. People aren’t going to spend five minutes reading a long story about why yours is the best cookbook site on the web. They’re not going to scroll through a long list of book titles to find one on how to decorate cake. They want to see at a glance where they want to go and click to the next page. Keep it short and sweet on the homepage.
Almost every website with a number of products has a search facility. However, this should not be thought of as a replacement for a well designed homepage. The visitor hasn’t come to a search engine – a search engine has already directed them to the site. If they typed ‘cake decorating designs‘ once in google, they don’t want to do it again on your site. Also, while you want to make it easy for them to find what they’re looking for, you also want them to notice other books while you’ve got their attention.
In a nutshell, there are three elements to a winning homepage. Make an eye-catching, themed design, keep your content to a minimum and make your site easy to navigate.