How to Create an Eye-Catching Homepage

You wouldn’t let your storefront get dirty, and you wouldn’t hang a poorly designed sign in your window. So why would you live with a bad website? SEO Overview
A poorly designed web site gives customers a bad first impression of your business. In fact, it may stop them from becoming your customers at all. In today’s digital world, an ugly website may be more damaging than an ugly storefront.
Quick Sprout, an online marketing company, gave statistics about the importance of web design:

• 94% of negative feedback about websites is design related.

• 38% of users will stop engaging with a website that has an unattractive layout.
• After a bad experience, 88% of consumers are unlikely to return to a website.

In fact, Forester Research said that web design is the number one return on investment for digital marketing. And a big part of design is your homepage—the first thing customers see when they go to your site.
Here are some tips for creating an eye-catching homepage that will impress customers.

Consider your audience

Think about your audience as a character in a book. How would you describe them? The better you understand your audience, the better you’ll be able to attract them.

Be Minimalist

Minimalism has been a running trend for a while now, especially in website design. Don’t overwhelm visitors. You want to limit the number of elements on the screen such as tabs, pictures and text.
Use white space. There’s nothing worse than clicking on a website and seeing a wall of text. 
The Quick Sprout article linked above also recommends using short sentences and paragraphs. Notice that most of the paragraphs in this post are only one or two sentences.
You should also have a call to action instantly visible.

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Pay Attention to Color

Your color scheme is critical for web design. While there’s no simple formula for choosing the perfect colors, you’ll want to think carefully about the associations people have with different colors. If you’re primarily targeting men, you probably don’t want to make your website pink. 
Different colors evoke different feelings, so consider the message you want your color scheme to convey.
A lot of brands are primarily associated with one color. Target and Coca-Cola are red. Starbucks is green. JLB is orange. What color or colors do you want to be associated with your brand?

Convey With Clarity

According to Crazy Egg, a company co-founded by Neil Patel, your homepage needs to communicate your unique selling proposition. Visitors should “know what you do and what sets you apart from the competition.”

Increase Loading Speed

Even if your website looks beautiful, no one is going to see it if it takes too long to load. They’ll just get bored and click away.
Attention spans are getting shorter, and a half second delay could result in a substantial drop in traffic and sales.
You can increase the speed of your website through a content delivery network (CDN). Distance makes websites load slowly. If someone on the opposite side of the planet tries to visit your site, it will take longer for the signal to reach them.
CDNs solve this problem by storing parts of your site on servers around the planet. This reduces the distance the signals have to travel and increases the loading speed.
JLB will set up CDNs to increase your website’s speed for only $___.

Examples

One of the keys to web design is great photography or video. Take this site for example. It has a beautiful photo that takes up most of the screen.
The site is also simple. There are only five tabs at the top (with no boxes or decorations around them), one CTA in the center, and one social media link. It’s uncluttered and doesn’t ask you to do too many things.
A similar example is NissanStadium.com. While it’s not quite as minimal as Kings (and doesn’t need to be), it centers around a high quality video and has hardly any words above the fold.
They also both use a limited number of fonts, and the fonts they do use are simple, not messy ones that are impossible to read.
Also, look at this example. It’s simple and uses great, high quality video.
If you’re looking for expert web design to create an eye-catching homepage, click below to request a proposal. JLB is a Nashville web design company.
Many businesses have to use multiple vendors (up to 10) to make their website function. But JLB does it all—a one stop shop for hosting, SEO, web design, content, etc—all local in-house.

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