7 Elements of a Successful Homepage

7 Elements Of A Successful Homepage Featured Image

 

Are you looking to build a strong homepage for your own business’ website? There are 7 elements you should include to make a successful homepage that draws in customers and shows them why they should choose your business for their needs.

 

Table of Contents:

1. Header

2. Hero Section

3. Call to Action (CTA) Button

4. High-Resolution Photos

5. Concise But Informative and Customer-Focused Copy

6. Testimonials

7. “3 Easy Steps”

 

Your header is the horizontal band at the top of your website that houses your menu. It usually includes your logo and menu and sometimes a number of extras, like your phone number, a search bar, language settings, or a “Call to Action” button (more on that later).

Your Logo should always go on the left side of your header, with your menu in the middle or on the right. While you most often see a full menu listing all of the site’s main pages, you can also choose a “hamburger menu” that expands when you click on it. We prefer to use the this on our own sites since it gives the menu bar a cleaner and more minimalist look:

Successfully designed website header with logo, menu, and call-to-action button

 

2. Hero Section

What is a Hero Section?

A “hero section” is the second topmost row of a webpage, right below your header. It’s the first thing visitors will see, so you want to hook them with a nice high-quality image or photo and a short but informative explanation of your company and services. As a rule of thumb, we usually write 1 main title describing a short overview of your services, followed by 1 subheading and 1 explanatory sentence.

How to Write a Hero Section

When writing your hero section, aim to answer these three questions: “Who are you?” “What do you do?” And, most importantly, “What value does your customer get from doing business with you?”

It helps to think about what problems your customer faces and what solutions or benefits they’re looking for. Start by identifying your ideal client(s) and their needs/problems/wants, then list how your services meet/solve each of those needs. Pick the most common 1 or 2 solutions as the values you want to highlight.

 

3. Call to Action (CTA) Button

A “call to action” or “CTA” button is a link that invites and tells your customers how to do business with you. In the upper part of your hero section, you’ve told them what you offer, now you need to tell them the first step they need to take.

In a few short words, tell your clients what first step they should to take to get the service/product they need. Try to make it intriguing or interesting to catch their attention like “Schedule a Discovery Call,” “Discover Design Options,” or, like ours, “Peek at the Price.”

NOTE: Make sure that your CTA is only a single phrase (not a full sentence) and around 2 to 5 words long. Anything longer than that becomes visually overwhelming and hard to read.

You can add your CTA button throughout the homepage. In fact, we subscribe to the Donald Miller school of thought. He is a business marketing leader who suggests you have one CTA and place buttons for that CTA in several places on the homepage. The easier you make it for potential customers to solve their problems, the more likely they are to contact you. We like to add a CTA button to the bottom of every major section to make it as easy as possible for them to get started.

 

4. High-Resolution Photos

We humans can process images 60,000 times faster than text and can form an opinion about a website in as little as 50 milliseconds. Images are extremely valuable tools for conveying not only information but feelings and ambiance as well, which can greatly influence a person’s decision to do business with you.

When choosing photos for your website, here are several things to keep in mind:

     1. Resolution

You want to choose crisp, high-resolution photos (1000 to 1250 pixels wide). Small photos are both blurry and make people see you as unprofessional.

     2. Relevancy

You want photos that reflect your business, your services/products, and the content they’re next to, but also the “tone” you have chosen for your company branding (professional, friendly, funny, etc.).

     3. Relatability / Human Connection

Human connection can get lost on the internet and make companies seem stiff and impersonal. Add that back by showing photos of you and your team and customers if you can.

     4. Originality

    1. People want to see visual proof of your business and learn more about your company (and find that human connection) before they trust you enough to business with you.
    2. If you can, the best thing is to hire a professional photographer to get quality images of your team on the job, your building/facility, your products/services, and of course happy clients. In our area, we recommend Dora Diamond Photography for websites and social media photography.
    3. That said, stock photos are not “evil,” and sometimes you do need them when it’s difficult or time-consuming to get a photo of a certain subject.

     5. Our main rule of thumb

Use original images whenever possible, and when using stock photos, choose ones that are artfully taken, unique, and not used on other websites (you’d be surprised how often some stock photos show up on various websites– check your competitors’ websites to make sure you don’t have the same images they do!)

 

5. Concise But Informative and Customer-Focused Copy

“Copy” is the technical term for the written content that makes up your website. The 2 biggest mistakes we see when people write their homepage copy are 1) it’s way too long or 2) it focuses more on the business’ accomplishments than the customer and their needs.

How Long Should Website Copy Be?

Keep your copy as concise as possible. Make paragraphs no longer than 4-5 sentences or 5 lines on a wide web page and don’t put more than 2 long paragraphs together at a time. If you have more than two longer paragraphs in one section, try adding in a subheading or two to break it up visually.

Some Helpful Tips:

  1. Don’t be afraid to break a big paragraph into several smaller ones– this makes content more skimmable.
  2. Always add descriptive headers/titles.
  3. You don’t have to always use paragraphs: in addition to lists and bullet points, we like to include sections like our “Service/Value Success” section, comprised of three statements with 1-2 sentence descriptions underneath eye-catching, relevant photos.

Check out this example on www.classicremodelinginc.com:

 

How to Write Copy That Focuses on the Customer

Website copy should show customers why they should choose you for their needs. Make sure you acknowledge the problems customers are facing, how they make your customer feel, and then describe how your services solve those problems.

Customers want to feel like you actually care about them and their problems, not just their money. Towards the bottom of your homepage, talk about how your company understands your customer’s struggle to get the services they need, and why your company cares.

When writing how you care for your customers, revisit your list of problems/pain points you know your customers experience, and try to relate to it. For example, talk about a time you personally received bad service in the past and opened your own business to prevent people from suffering through that again. Or simply state that you understand how difficult it is to find good, reliable service, and how you aim to fix that.

Here’s an example we did on True Test RV: (https://truetestrv.com/)

True Test Rv Homepage Care Statement

 

Just remember that caring will go a long way to win over your potential customers, giving them that “human connection” and helping build rapport with them before they even talk to you. Everyone wants to be treated with care and respect, and the more you show that to your potential customers, the more likely they are to choose you for their needs.

 

6. Testimonials

Testimonials are incredibly powerful when customers decide to do business with you– in fact, 76% of people say they regularly read reviews when browsing for local businesses.

This all plays into “social proof,” the phenomenon where we look to others around us to know how we should behave in uncertain situations. With businesses and products, we look for positive social proof to help us decide if we should trust a business or not.

Integrating reviews into your homepage is key to building trust with your potential customers. It gives them the positive social proof that they’re looking for, puts them at ease as they read through your homepage, and makes them more likely to reach out to you. (It also lets you choose which reviews they see first and helps them build a stronger first impression).

We usually include two of the best reviews spaced out in between sections (avoid putting a review right at the very top of your page – your informative content always takes precedence). We place one review about 1/3 of the way down the page, and then another 2/3 of the way down the page to space them out naturally.

 

7. Make Life Easy for Your Potential Customer

Potential customers want to know what to expect when doing business with you. We all feel a lot more comfortable and willing to trust a company when we know how they work. So we break down what to expect it into 3 steps to both explain the process and address any worries they may have. Each step should have both an action to take and a short description that tells you more.

Your first step should be aligned with your CTA button – usually to reach out via your preferred contact method. For example, “Get a Free Quote” or “Schedule a Discovery Call.” Then you describe a little about what will happen during or afterwards, like setting up a date for an in-person meeting, how long it will take you to get back to them with a proposal, etc.

Your second usually describes the “getting-to-know-you” or “contract review” phases where you either meet up with them in person or give them your work proposal to review. So your main action could be “Meet to Discuss Your Needs,” or “Review and Sign Contract.”

For your third step, you always want to end on a positive note! Talk about how they get the service that they need, plus any other bonuses, like peace of mind, gaining extra time for their business or family, or a stress-free experience.

Take a look at what we wrote for https://armstrong-interiors.com:

 

Conclusion

Writing and building your own homepage can be quite an endeavor. Despite the rather short amount of actual written content and images, a lot of time, effort, and careful planning goes into every word and design choice. Mark Twain once wrote, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” If they had websites in his day, he would likely say the same about writing website copy.

We hope this guide comes in handy with planning out your new website. If you find that you don’t have time to finish or would like professional help building your website, schedule a call with us today!

 

Looking for more website tips? Read more articles in our Website Tips Series below:

How to Easily Make Responsive Headers for Mobile and Tablets in Beaver Builder (Step-by-Step Guide with Pictures)

Best Practices for Business Website Images (4 Tips for Optimizing Your Photos)

The Keyboard Shortcut to Quickly Open Beaver Builder’s Responsive Editing Mode (Plus Other Helpful Keyboard Shortcuts for Beaver Builder)

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