In this week’s blog post I want to address the topic of homepage clutter. I find it useful to compare a company’s homepage to the entrance to a home. Can you imagine a house full of stuff where the rooms had no walls and upon entering the house visitors saw the entire contents at once? The homepage is no different. The homepage should be impressive but it also needs to make it easy for people to get to where they want to get and you don’t want to bombard people with too much unnecessary information. But few companies do this well – particularly in small business. It seems a fairly typical small business homepage design is comprised of a menu (or a few), an image slider of some sort (or a few), maybe a news module, a welcome message, perhaps a few promos, maybe a contact us button or a phone number. Have you ever stopped to wonder why small businesses seem intent on cramming so much into their homepages?

So if your aim is to create a clutter free homepage how do we go about it? I have provided below a number of examples of how you can achieve it.

1. Use your homepage as as funnel not a brochure – webcircle.com.au

In general you don’t know a lot about people who land on your homepage. You know they are perhaps interested in your business or your area of expertise but you don’t know what they want. A lot of homepages try to achieve too much – they are filled up with content that tries to ‘sell’ the benefits of what you do, sign-up forms, latest products, news items, sliders and more. Visitors find it hard to get to where they want to go for one thing but it’s also very difficult to provide only the right content to “convert” the visitor on the homepage since you don’t know a lot about them.

Read More…