5 features your website homepage should have

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Since your homepage is the first point of contact for anybody looking for your business online, it’s important to make a good first impression. As much as you might want to make your homepage as flashy as possible, you won’t achieve anything if you don’t have some basic elements first. You can add the sexy, attention-grabbing stuff later, but not before you include these five features first.

Contact Information

You should always include the contact information for your business right on your homepage. That should go without saying, but there are still far too many businesses that bury things such as their email address, phone number, and business location on their website where people can’t find it. While your contact information doesn’t need to be front and center underneath your business’s logo, you should be able to see it with a quick glance at your homepage. You can place it at the bottom of the page (possibly the footer), but it absolutely needs to be there. After all, you won’t be able to serve any of your clients if they don’t know how to reach you.

Engaging Images

One of the purposes of a homepage is to grab your visitors’ attention. As enlightening as a well-written welcome message or a blog post can be, they can’t hold a candle to an engaging photo or logo. You shouldn’t load your homepage full of high-resolution photographs since they can cause your site to load slowly on old computers, but a few images that relates to your product or service that entices your would-be clients to want to know more about your business are a must for any homepage.

A Video

Not all businesses will be able to show a video right on their homepage, but a short clip welcoming visitors will help sell what you have to offer. Videos are arguably becoming more ubiquitous online than text, so you should definitely make a video that relates to your services if you can. Just be careful about what you show; nobody likes a loud or obnoxious ad to start playing as soon as they log onto a site. As long as your video is low-key and to the point, it will make your homepage more effective.

A Blog

Even though some people might say otherwise, blogging is not dead. A well-written and well-maintained blog can allow you to provide news and information to your clients that you might not be able to convey anywhere else. Naturally, you should include links to your blog right on your homepage. Like your contact information, try to make this link as easy to find as possible. As always, make sure you update your blog regularly to keep your readers and clients coming back.

Links to Social Media

In this day and age, you absolutely need to have a presence on social media if you want to reach as many people as possible. Naturally, it’s not enough just to create a Facebook or Twitter account for your business; you need to make sure people can find those accounts, which means putting links to them on your homepage. Think of this as an extension of your contact information. Make it easy to find, and encourage users to follow you on their preferred social networks. While you’re at it, make sure that you update your accounts regularly. Like your blog, you need to give visitors a reason to keep coming back to you.

When it comes to the homepage for your business, you can technically do whatever you want to make it enticing for your visitors. However, you should always include these features if you can. They will be far more effective at making the all-important first impression that your business needs to grow.

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Why your website copy is important

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Search engine optimization is important. That much has been known to copywriters and marketers for as long as search engines have been in use. Search engine optimization – or SEO, as it is more commonly called – ensures that your website shows up high on Google searches and receives the kind of traffic that your business needs to thrive in the digital age. However, it isn’t everything. Your website might be able to get some extra hits if you design it solely with SEO in mind, but that won’t make a difference if your copy isn’t worth reading. Thanks to the changes that have been made to search engine algorithms over the years, poor website copy will actually hurt your rankings with Google no matter what kind of SEO strategies you employ.

Now that we’ve covered the basics about why website copy is important, we can be more specific about what good website copy is, how you can achieve it, and how to avoid some basic copywriting mistakes.

Focus on Your Content

Most of having good copy for your website is simply having well-written content. This means paying close attention to grammar and spelling, two things that are often lacking even on the most “professional” sites on the Internet. Few things will scare away potential clients faster than a site that reads like it was written by a middle school student, so brush up on your grammar and spelling, and don’t be afraid to invest in a tool that will check any document you write for mistakes.

Having good content also means being short and to the point. People might spend hours browsing the Internet, but they often spend only a few minutes at the most on one site. They would rather scan pages than read them, and if what they are looking for doesn’t jump out at them almost immediately, they’ll probably just move onto another site in a matter of seconds. This also means paying attention to content hierarchy, the idea that certain content will be more relevant to your visitors than others. If your site has been around long enough that you have analytics to monitor, you can see what pages on your site are the most popular and who is visiting them. Take a look at the material on these pages, and put it either on your homepage or include links to it that are easy to find.

Design Should Come Second?

As important as it is to have a well-designed and visually appealing website, what’s equally if not more important is your content. Think of your website’s design as a setting for your content; it should make it easy to read and digest while enhancing it. It should not eclipse it, however. If your site’s design is too much of a distraction or it makes navigation too difficult, you will need to redesign your site, possibly from the ground up.

SEO is Still Important

Even though we said that good SEO won’t help you if you don’t have good copy, SEO is still relevant. You should still include the right keywords and backlinks to optimize your site for search engine hits, but their goal should be to get your visitors to your content. Make sure that any keywords and phrases you use are incorporated into your content naturally and that your backlinks go to sites that are relevant to what you have to offer.

Keep Things Evergreen

Finally, you should at least be making an attempt to keep your content evergreen. At least some of your content will become dated in time, but most of it should be applicable to the world as it exists now. It won’t do you much good to have a homepage that references snowy winters if someone is looking at it in the middle of July, so write your content in a way that is applicable to harsh winters, warm summers, and every season in between. Your potential clients will take you and your company much more seriously that way.

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Designing with Mobile in Mind

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According to statistics at The Social Skinny, there were over 1.2 billion people accessing the Internet with their mobile devices in 2012. That number has been increasing greatly since then. Trends show that people are now more likely to surf the Web on their smartphones than they are with a computer. This means that websites need to be designed with mobile devices in mind, which is different from designing sites for desktop in a lot of ways.

Even though mobile sites can serve many different purposes, there is still a checklist of things that you will need if you want your site to be successful.

Design for Devices

One of the most important things to remember when designing a mobile site is that there are several different devices in use at any given time, and you should be able to access your site on almost all of them. Whether you design your site yourself or you work with a developer, make sure that it works conveniently on multiple devices and operating systems.

Site Speed

The appeal of a mobile device is that it can be used while you’re on the move. When you are trying to look up information about nearby businesses, you need to be able to access that information quickly. Otherwise, you might miss out on important details before you set out for your destination. This means that any mobile site should be designed to load quickly. You might be able to get away with lots of elaborate bells and whistles on a full desktop site, but a mobile site should be different. It doesn’t have to be a completely bare-bones site, but function and user experience should trump form.

User Experience

Mobile sites should be designed with a positive user experience in mind. For some sites, this can mean simply being easy to use and navigate, while other sites can have things such as coupon codes and advertisements that are specific to certain locations. Some sites can even be presented as games that reward users for accessing the site and using its features, a concept known as “gamification.” In any case, you should never sacrifice site speed and accessibility for these features. If the best course of action is a simple site that can give users what they need quickly without any added features, then that’s what your mobile site should be.

SEO

Finally, any good website should be designed with SEO in mind. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it essentially means making your site easier to find through Google and other search engines. In the past, this often meant basing your web content around certain keywords and phrases that people might type into a search engine. For mobile sites, it might mean targeting users in specific regions and focusing on their specific needs. In other words, it is more about making sure your site is desirable as well as easy to find.

As you can probably tell, designing a mobile site can definitely be a challenge, but it is also a necessity for any successful business. While elaborate desktop websites will always be around, more people are accessing the Internet on smaller portable devices, and business owners everywhere need to cater to them if they are going to be successful.

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