Design
Your homepage has one job
Ask most owners what their homepage is for and you get a list. A list is how a page ends up producing nothing at all.
Pick the one thing. Call, book, buy, or email. Everything above the fold serves that thing, and everything that competes with it moves down or goes away.
How to pick
Not what you want most. What the visitor is ready to do. Someone who found you thirty seconds ago because a pipe is leaking is ready to call. They are not ready to sign up for your newsletter, and offering both makes the call button smaller.
What the top of the page needs
- What you do and where. "Custom cabinetry in Tuscaloosa." Not "Welcome to our website."
- The one action, as a button, large enough to hit with a thumb.
- One reason to trust you — a photograph of real work, a number of years, a review.
That is it. Everything else is the rest of the page.
Things that compete for the same attention
A rotating slider — most people never see slide two, and it delays the page. A newsletter pop-up before anyone has read a sentence. Six social icons in the header, sending people away from a page you paid for. A menu of eleven items. A video that plays automatically.
Make the action repeat
If the answer is "call," the phone number belongs at the top, again halfway down, and again at the bottom — as a tappable link, not typed as plain text. Nobody should have to scroll back up to hire you.
The test
Show your homepage to someone who does not know your business. Five seconds, then take it away, and ask two questions: what does this business do, and what did it want you to do? If they can answer both, the page works. If they say "it looked nice," it does not — and looking nice was never the assignment.