Everything has an initial point. The one where everything begins. What does your small business start with? Is that your product, services, or a client? In fact, everything starts with the first time a potential client meets the products or services you offer. Nowadays, it mostly happens on the Internet and is directly connected with your website home page.
What is a home page?
A home page is also sometimes called a main page or a start page. This is the part of your website that is easily reached and receives the most considerable part of your Internet traffic. That is why its design is highly important for your marketing strategy, as far as it helps you not simply to attract attention but to gain an actual profit. Thus, a home page is a start of the marvelous journey with your brand that people take. If designed properly, you can make this journey truly great.
The peculiarities of designing for a small business
The importance of a home page design is clear. Every business should devote lots of efforts to creating a perfect home page design, with effective call to action elements, precise content, and beautiful visuals. However, different kinds of business have different demands and, what is more important, different possibilities. Have you ever seen a home page of Mercedes-Benz?
It looks exquisite and luxurious due to the expensive cars it advertise. It doesn’t have any specific zest but people still adore it. However, if you are running a small business and don’t have billions of fans through all over the world, a special zest on your home page design is what can help people to make their choice and buy the products or services you offer.
- Be consistent
This is the first and most important rule that usually gets broken while designing a home page for a small business. As a rule, people do their utmost to impress others. Web design is no exception. That is why we can often see highly creative home pages with different elements that revolve, dance, fly, dazzle, and make other weird moves. Such animation increases the user engagement and makes clients stay on the page a bit longer. Still, there is always another side of the medal. Despite using these elements as one of the loudest web design trends for 2018, people often forget that a home page is not the only place where these interactive elements should be implemented. Often, other landing pages are forgotten. As a result, your website experiences the lack of consistency.
A possible way out
Along with placing the supporting elements on your business home page, try to do the same with the other web pages that your website includes. This way, you will get the entire story that also supports a notion of storytelling.
- Make it simple
This rule is closely connected with the previous one. When we are speaking about a small business home page design, we don’t need it to be necessarily created in a minimalistic style. However, when it is oversaturated with additional elements, it can distract people from the call to action buttons that are critically important when you want to gain a real profit. Sometimes, even the texture used for a home page design can cause more damage than one could even expect. Thus, always aim at facilitating the design for your small business if you don’t want to appear kitschy, heavy, and excessive. The cleaner your home page design is, the better feedback it will get in the future.
- Don’t forget about the real call to action
Do it!
Buy it!
Use it!
The call to action button is a magical tool every home page should obtain. No matter what color you choose, whether you make this button red, orange, green, or yellow, you need to play on the contrast and make it in the center of attention, you still need to have it and make it distinguished. Sometimes, trying to improve the efficiency of the home page design, people make the worst mistake regarding the call to action button, meaning placing too many buttons and making them too bright. This way, they make their web design crammed and overfilled.
A possible way out
Think of the call to action button as of the magical tool that helps your client to get to your business. Magic rarely happens, doesn’t it? That is why it should be used wise. If you think that one call to action button is not enough, use two or three of them, but never more. Moderation is a key to your success.
- Scrolling on the home page
Your home page design should be user-friendly and convenient. This convenience starts first with the scrolling. It should be smooth and quick, allowing users to use your home page the way they want to. If there is anything that hinders users in terms of scrolling, no call to action button or inventive design will help. It doesn’t mean that you should scroll from up to down. Different types of scrolling will do, the more creative – the better.
- Optimization of a home page design
Your home page design needs to be responsive and optimized for different gadgets. Though it seems to be a common truth, not every website follows it. As a result, we see images of a poor quality all over the Internet when we browse using a phone and not a laptop. This should stop immediately. If you want your small business to boast about having an effective home page design that brings a great profit, you need to think of its optimization. In this case, the speed of loading matters as much as the responsiveness of your home page. If there are too many visual elements, try using a lazy loading instead of a common one. This will not harm your traffic but give you some excellent results.
Bottom line
A small business home page is the place that introduces your product to people. Thus, its design should be carefully thought through in order to avoid the basic mistakes made by most people.
BIO
Natalie Antiuk works for DesignContest, a marketplace that conducts web design services of the highest quality. She is keen on web design combined with its usage in launching startups and marketplaces.
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