How to create successful home pages?

A lot of organizations focus on the home page BUT the home page is the least important page in your website. So it’s probably the page you should finish last not first.

You think it’s the first page everybody is going to see first. So you start working out on it first. But what the designers have to do is first to figure out what is the most important content you have in the website. So you can create a usable path in the home page to the most important things you want to do in the website.

I think designers will hate me!

Most of the designers will yell at me now and say that the home page is the most important page because it’s the entry point of users who are coming to the website so they designers need to make a positive impression for users who is just arriving.

I will compare the home page of the website like the Lobby of the Hotel. And when people go to any hotel the lobby is not the most important place in the hotel. If you just arrived from a long tired trip and you are having an early meeting in the morning or looking for some rest and you need to sleep before you go. Then common sense says you will be just looking for the bed to sleep or bathroom. So the Lobby is not going to be the place you want to be.

When people go to a website they just don’t go to the website to have a look or hang around. Like you don’t know go to a Hotel Lobby just to look at the Lobby. People go in because they have another thing they want to do there and you want to get them to that thing.

You Only Have 5 Sec.

And that thing is what’s most important if they go to the nice home page looking for something and you lead them to another thing. They are going to leave immediately actually you only have 5 Seconds to get their attention to what they are looking for. And you can check it yourself with a Google Analytic you will find the home page is the most exit page in your website

And I think what makes the people focus on the home page is because it’s the easy thing to focus on it’s that decorative page that we can really do some nice stuff and it’s easy because it’s one of them.

Case Study

Amazon.com
Nobody goes to Amazon.com home page looking for a specific book or gift for someone. Nobody buy a product because it’s featured in the home page of amazon.com or a product that you can find in the recommendations of Amazon or from the section of other customers bought this.

News Websites
News websites are different from any other website if you have news or something people are coming for. If you heard an important news such as for example now you can change 1 pound for 1 US Dollar (Hopefully!) then you will go to any news website. You will find this news in the home page. then you will give it a click to read the whole story. So study what you just did!! You went to the home page you found the news in the first page you give it a click and you leave the home page to read the article or the news you came for.

Conclusion

If want to really focus on the home page you should first study your visitors know why they come to the website and what they are looking for. After than create for them short path that can lead them to what they want with few mouse clicks. And focus on how to get the users away from the home page as fast as you can.

Finally I Hope You Enjoy it, please write me here your comments or suggestions for what do you want the next article to be

Mohammed Alaa
User Interface Designer