What’s the first page many people often visit on your website? If you said the homepage, you’re spot-on. Since first impressions last long, it makes sense to have a homepage that appeals to your target audience.
Many websites have poorly designed homepages, resulting in customer losses. In trying to save costs by developing their own websites, small business owners mistakenly create homepages that turn off visitors.
With that in mind, here are three common mistakes small businesses make when designing the homepages of their websites.
Missing Your Target Audience
What do you do if you visit a website and find that it talks about something you’re not interested in? You close the tab or hit the back button of your browser, don’t you? That’s what happens when visitors discover that your homepage doesn’t address them.
Most homepages focus on the business instead of customers. When visitors realize this, which happens within seconds, they leave your website immediately. Unfortunately, you lose a customer not only for now but for the foreseeable future.
Customers visit your homepage with a purpose. They’re looking for specific information or to purchase a product or service. Unless you know what they’re looking for, whatever you put on your homepage won’t resonate with them.
To give them what they want, you need to understand them. Armed with that knowledge, you provide your visitors with exactly what they want. For example, if they want to know how to coach children to play ice hockey, your homepage should focus on that.
It’s helpful to also include social proof to show your visitors that you’ve helped others like them in the past. For example, you can say that you’ve coached 5,023 coaches on how to coach children.
A Lack of a Clear or Weak Call to Action
When you understand your target audience, your website will contain what they want. Taking the above-mentioned example about coaching people who coach children, you may have created an ebook to give away to your visitors.
Unless you direct your audience where to go, many might not find the ebook. As a result, such visitors will have a bad website user experience, and there’s no way they’ll recommend your website to others.
Contrast this with a homepage that tells visitors what to do to access the ebook. It may ask the visitors to enter their email addresses in a form to receive the ebook. Your visitors will be clear about what they should do, and many of them might follow your direction.
A confused customer, due to a bad experience, doesn’t act because they don’t know what to do.
To ensure that visitors to your homepage or any page know what to do next, always include a call to action (CTA). Use language that’s easy to understand, whether in a form or on a button such as “Download Now,” “Add to Cart,” “Buy Now,” or “Subscribe.”
Your Homepage Is Cluttered and Confusing
The second web design mistake is having a homepage that’s cluttered and confusing. Such pages lack clarity and overwhelm visitors. Website visitors often make decisions fast.
A cluttered homepage doesn’t help with that because the more cluttered elements it has, the harder and slower it is to make decisions. It’s best to present visitors with an uncluttered homepage. It’s for this reason that homepages designed to capture emails or other contact details work so well.
When you design a homepage, focus on clarity to make it easy for visitors to navigate. Whatever the number of elements you add, ensure that you arrange them to get the visitor to do what you want.
The most important idea is to carefully think through the design of your homepage: the layout, elements, and copy so that it gets visitors to act as you wish.
Final Words
If you avoid the three mistakes mentioned above about homepage design, you’ll be glad you spent the time and effort to do so. Your homepage will convert more when it’s targeted to your audience, is uncluttered, and includes clear calls to action.
I get that creating a homepage or website that delivers an impeccable user experience isn’t easy. It takes making many errors, lots of testing, and having many interactions to come up with an impactful homepage.
Fortunately, TNK Solutions has the time and expertise to design a homepage or website you’ll love. Get in touch with us for free web design consultation and turn your homepage into a customer-generating machine.
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