Quick Guide to Writing a Business Website Homepage

Target audience:

Your business website´s home page must be all things to all the people who type your URL in their navigation bar, whether it´s their six-hundredth visit or whether they just happened to catch your web address painted on the back of your car.

Content:

For the benefit of new visitors, a home page must provide a snapshot of who you are and what visitors can do on your website. Your first one to three paragraphs should give a quick overview of what visitors can do on your site. For example, you could include a short paragraph each on “buy widgets”, “learn more about widgets”, and “meet other widget enthusiasts”, with links to your shopping cart, informational articles, and message board, respectively.

For returning visitors, the home page must serve as a touchstone for navigating the site, announcing new developments and pointing out especially popular or useful pages. For these visitors you don´t have to write anything new especially for your homepage. Anyone who’s coming back to your site is already interested and is going to want to jump right into the deeper pages of your site, rather than linger on the homepage wondering whether it’s worth their time.

Your home page should include teasers for the inside pages of your site. For instance, you could have a tip of the week, linked to a web page on your site with an article explaining it. Good navigation (list of links to the four to eight most essential web pages on your site) is also a must.

For both new and returning visitors, always give a prominent place to a featured product or service (or two or three) with a picture, one or two-sentence description, and a link to its own web page or its place in your “products and services page,” catalogue or shopping cart.

You should also probably feature a satisfied customer preferably with a photo. But  always include a testimonial quotation, and a link to a case study or customer story on its own web page, which you should definitely find time to write or have written for you by a website content provider.

Title:

Don´t title your home page “Welcome to [name of your site]“. Don´t include that message anywhere on your homepage, in fact. It”s a waste of space. This was normal in the 1990s but it”s pretty outdated now. Everyone already knows they”re on your site. What you need to tell them is what they can do there. Try something like “Buy, Study, and Discuss Widgets”.

Also make sure your title incorporates any keywords you think people might use to search for your product or service on the internet. Search engines decide how to categorise pages largely based on the homepage title and first heading text.

Length:

Ideally, the first few paragraphs of the homepage (the ones aimed at new visitors) should not be more than 100-350 words total. The teasers for inside pages targeted to returning visitors should not be more than about 100 words each.

Making Sure Your Website Has the Best Homepage Possible:

Before your homepage goes live, test it out on a few people. Don’t just ask your volunteers how they like your homepage. Courtesy may prevent you from getting an honest response. Instead, ask them to find how to buy your latest product or if they understand what?s the most important development in your company recently. If they can navigate to the correct page within about eight seconds (the average human attention span on the web), you’ve done well.

You may just want to hire a website copywriter, online copywriting firm, or website content provider to create your homepage for you. After all, you wouldn’t build your own office building, would you? Of course, that´s not an entirely fair comparison; more people will see your business website homepage than will ever see your office building.

What a Business Website Homepage is Not:

• A homepage is not the place to dump a long description of your business. That´s for the “about us” or “company information” page. On the homepage, this information will just bore most people.
• A homepage is not the place where you list and sell all your products (unless you only have one or two). You should have a special products and services page for that, and preferably a shopping cart or catalog. Trying to make people buy right on your homepage is a little pushy. The homepage will also get over-crowded as your offerings expand. Instead, just include a list of product categories with links to inside pages, along with direct links to your biggest sellers.
• A homepage is not the place to include the full text of your announcements and press releases. Just include a teaser paragraph of each article on the homepage, with a link to the web page with the full text. If people want to read the full text, they can. If they don´t, you haven´t bored them to tears.
• A homepage is not your company president´s or owner´s personal blog. It´s OK to rant, rave, or preach the need for world peace. Just don´t do it on wesellwidgets.com

As you´ve probably noticed, a good website has multiple pages. You should have special web pages for special topics: an “about us” page for company information, a products and services catalog, the president´s blog, etc. When you advertise or send out links to your site, you should link directly to the most appropriate page, rather than just the homepage.
Of course, that doesn´t mean you don´t need a homepage, just that you don´t need it to do every single thing you want your website to accomplish.

• when it was last updated
• how often it usually changes
• how important it is, relative to other URLs in the site

That information helps search engines to more intelligently crawl your site. The Sitemaps protocol is a standard that makes it easier to create a sitemap that can be parsed by all search engines.

How can the Sitemaps protocol help your website?

Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the sitemap and learn about those URLs using the associated metadata.

The sitemap allows you to inform search engines about the pages on your website. Depending on how your website is structured, it can be easier for search engines to find all of your web pages if you use a sitemap.

How do search engines find my Sitemaps file? What’s new?

The big four search engines Google, Yahoo, Live/MSN and Ask will now automatically index your Sitemaps file if you add a link to your Sitemaps file in your robots.txt file.

All the major search engines regularly check the robots.txt of a website. Just add the following line to your robots.txt file:

Sitemap: http:/www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml

Of course, you can also actively inform Google and Yahoo about your Sitemap file. This is not possible with Live/MSN and Ask.

Does a Sitemaps file improve your search engine rankings?

Using the Sitemap protocol does not guarantee that your web pages are included in search engines, but provides hints for web crawlers to do a better job of crawling your site.

A sitemap helps search engines to find your web pages but it does not help you to get higher search engine rankings.

When search engines index your web pages, they must find optimised web page content and good inbound links. Search engines will only give your web pages high rankings if they have both.

The Sitemaps protocol can help you to inform search engines about your web pages. Further information about the new sitemaps standard can be found on the official sitemaps web site.

It was found that 28% of online sellers were using customer ratings and reviews. More than half said they were considering it.

Asked about the effects of customer ratings on their Web sites, over half of online retailers in the United Kingdom, the United States and Europe said their overall conversion rates had gone up in the past year, compared with only 9% who said they fell.

Nearly eight in 10 online sellers thought a major benefit of such reviews was to increase conversions, while 73% thought improved customer retention and loyalty were major benefits. Nearly six in 10 thought the fact that customer reviews improved search engine optimisation was a significant benefit.

“Tapping into social commerce can be a great way of gaining a competitive advantage, for example through ratings and reviews,” Linus Gregoriadis, E-consultancy’s head of research, said in a statement. “But apart from the early adopters, this is something a large proportion of online retailers are only just starting to think seriously about.”

Objectives

Know your site’s objectives – The success of your company’s website should, at the end of the day, hinge on how well it achieves your objectives. To help with identifying your website’s objectives, here’s a starter list of the most common ones:

• Generate more qualified traffic
• Produce more leads
• Sell more products
• Educate buyers
• Generate passive income
• Increase employee productivity.

Once you identify all the objectives for your site, see if you can’t prioritise what the top three objectives are. Keeping these top three objectives for your website in the forefront, you’ll do a far better job of designing a website that achieves your objectives.

Identity

Make your online identity synch up with your offline one – Most small businesses have spent many hours and dollars developing an offline company identity. This identity, found in existing signage, PowerPoint presentations or brochures, may have already established an image in the minds of visitors who land on your site. That’s why you should work hard to incorporate logos, icons, colours and typestyles from your offline identity into your online one.

Key Actions

Identify the three  key actions you would like your site visitors to do on your site – A short time ago, I was hired to audit a client’s website. When I met with the owner, I asked him to name the top three things he wanted visitors to do after arriving at his website. He said he wanted them to :

1) place an order for his spa covers;
2) understand why his spa covers were superior to the competitors’ and
3) order accessory items.

But when I visited his site for the first time, I couldn’t see how to do any of these three tasks. For your small business website to succeed, first identity your Three most important outcomes and then make each one glaringly obvious. Use whatever design ideas you and your website designer can come up with (i.e. box them in, shade them a different color, use bursts), but just make sure they’re as obvious as the nose on your face.

Entice

Draw visitors in with your first two paragraphs of copy. You’ve got between 15 and 30 seconds to convince a visitor to stay on your site, so your first 100 words of copy have got to be compelling. I once heard a webmaster refer to these first 100 words as your “opening statement”. And much like the lawyer arguing in court, if your opening statement doesn’t convince your visitor, you’ll fail to win your case.

Search

Consider including a search box – According to website marketing guru Jakob Nielsen, 50 percent of all website visitors are search-dominant; meaning they arrive at a website fully expecting to search its content using a search box. So, if your site contains many pages (over 100), articles, white papers, or back issues of newsletters, provide a search box that’s easy to find and use.

Tagline

Use a tagline – Good sites often use a tagline to communicate what their site is all about, and place it inside the front page header for maximum exposure. Some of the world’s most popular websites use this approach including:

• Facebook – “Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.”
• YouTube – “Broadcast Yourself.”

Consistency

Keep the web page layout consistent throughout your site – I disagree with those who say the home page template should differ from the site’s interior pages. In my mind, all pages, images, elements, typefaces, headings, and footers should stay consistent throughout your site.

Succint

Keep text short – Recent statistics show that people read from computer screens 25% slower than from paper. To address this, break up your small business’ website copy into small blocks, use shorter paragraphs, lead off text sections with subheads, and occasionally use bullet pointed lists.

FAQs

Provide a FAQ section – For recurring questions, a FAQ section can be a godsend. A FAQ will also help first time visitors get acquainted with your company and its philosophy. But more importantly, a FAQ section will build trust and credibility in the mind of a visitor by helping them answer their own questions.

Sales Tools

Make your sales tools available on your site – One of my larger clients hangs its latest PowerPoint sales presentations off its website. That way, one of its sales reps can give a product demo to a prospect in a different state without either of them leaving their offices. If your small business is national in scope, think of the travel savings if you adopt this approach.

Contact

Provide contact information on every page – Many times buyers print off web pages for further review. Then, they end up contacting your company from that piece of paper. That’s why it’s so important to include your company’s address, phone numbers and email at the bottom of each web page. As a marketer, your job is to make it as easy to do business with your company as possible. This is one way.

Media

Increase media access to your company with a press room – If one objective of your site is to generate media coverage, consider adding a self-serve “Press Room” to the site. The more accessible your website is to the media, the more your company will be written about.

Follow these twelve tips and you’ll be well on your way to a standout website design.

1. The Internet is probably the first place a person will go to get information on your company. Most people are online daily for tasks such as banking, shopping, emailing and so on. Many people prefer to read websites at work – it looks like they’re working when in fact they may be researching a product and/or service that they require. This is the face of your business and the first impression your company conveys. If a user doesn’t like what they see, they’re onto the next site.

2. Your competitors are online (and making money). You don’t want to get lost in the shuffle. In order to obtain new customers, generate new sales leads, and promote marketing campaigns there is no more effective tool than a company’s website. People in China aren’t going to know anything about you except for what your website has to say. It is essential to distinguish your company from your competitors.

3. A well designed website will give you added visibility and credibility. The new site will bring new interest in and establish creditability for your company over time. It can serve as a central building block for your branding, marketing and accordant sales support strategy for years to come.

4. Do you find you answer the same question over and over again? If so that should maybe be on the homepage of your website. A website should tell people what you do and how good you are. If your customers know what you do before they call, the conversation will be shorter and more productive.