The homepage is one of the more important website design I spend most of my time on when helping a client come up with a new website template. Not only is it the first landing page customers experience normally but it’s the doorman of your website. If your website design or website architecture is not optimized then you get a rude doorman answering to your customers.
Homepage design nowadays are unique and have adapted the one page sales letter concept. If you’ve seen a website trying to sell you something, it’s a long page with a lot of content about the product and very little website design.
Let’s come back to our new designer homepages that have optimized their landing pages for search engines after adapting to the sales letter concept.
The great thing about this new concept is it hard sell your services to potential customers. It isn’t so obvious because you’re not bogged by long write up but instead asked to view more visual based design work. The normal structure of homepages with this concept is; header, navigation, about, works, and contact form.
The preferred number of columns for these website designs are single or 2-column website layouts. This helps retain the much needed focus of the designers work and possibly the main reason the visitor is surfing the website designer’s website.
The effectiveness of using this new trend is questionable in the numbers of:
- Request for Proposal
- Request for Quotations
- Request for General Enquiries
A homepage that uses a website design with this flow keeps the goal of a website simple and easy to achieve. However, the weaknesses of this trend is that it limits the content you can stuff into the homepage itself.
As we know it, not everyone loves to scroll down a webpage and with less actual typed content it might affect your homepage ability to be optimized for search engines. So for this trend its both a great benefit and a high risk.
To me, every homepage design should fulfill the goal of the client’s website. It’s website design should be based not only on the goal but the behavioural patterns the client’s customers might have with their website.
So evaluate your target audience and its possible behavioural actions and then produce a website design that will support the goal of your website.