How A Goal-Oriented Homepage Can Bring You More Business
A homepage that is designed to be clean, simple, and direct users where to go next will improve online lead generation. Why is a first impression so important you ask? Basically because Web sites are often a potential customer’s first detailed encounter with your company. In less than five seconds visitors are making judgments about if they are at the right site or not, what the quality and value of your company are, and whether or not they want to do business with you.
Guiding users where to go next on your site is a great usability practice and will make visitors feel more confident that you have the information they are looking for. A great example of this can be found on a new site we recently created for a company that specializes in handcrafted Amish furniture here in Northern Indiana.
To formulate a strategy for their new site we first looked at the site of one of their older brands. We noticed was that the homepage was extremely content heavy and there was no clear indication where a visitor was to go next.
We then helped the client define their three main goals for the new site; drive more foot traffic to their bricks and mortar store, have people browse their online catalog and submit a request for a quote, and lastly to capture prospective customers information in the email newsletter sign up form.
We first utilized their beautiful photos to create an engaging slideshow on the homepage to help confirm to visitors that they were in the right place if they were looking for quality, hand-crafted Amish furniture. We then set up three doors or entry points into the site that would guide the visitors depending on what they wanted to do. The three entry points on the homepage graphically represented the clients goals. A navigation menu was intentionally left of the design to better funnel the users to the three goals. We also set up tracking code on the three goal areas to measure valuable information about the visitors and their behavior on the site.
The result was an easy-to-navigate, beautiful site that was able to meet the client’s goals and needs. With web analytics we were able to see that the site had a low bounce rate (people immediately exiting the site) which meant that when users landed on the homepage there were reaffirmed that they were in the right spot to look for Amish furniture. The length of time spent on the site was a good indicator that users were logically funneled to the right spot to get the additional information they were looking at. Another great insight into how effectively the design worked was the high amount of page views made by each visitor.
The new Brandenberry site was able to perform in a way the older brand site could not due primarily to the planning and strategy that went into the design before it was created. If you are considering a new Web site I’d suggest that you start with a good primer about the 11 Questions You Should Ask Yourself When Developing a Web Strategy.
