How To Create A Homepage That Works



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Want to know what the worst thing to say on a homepage is?

"Welcome to our homepage."

And yet, time after time, we all come across such homepages on the Internet. The reason that this is such a poor opening gambit is the fact that the visitor already knows he / she is looking at your homepage, what's the point in teaching them to suck eggs?

Your website's homepage needs to contain much more important messages than a simple welcome statement or brief history to your company. Why has someone landed on your website in the first place? What problem are they looking to solve?

What type of information do they seek? If your homepage doesn't convey that your website has the answers to these questions in the visitors' minds then it's game over - they will leave, never to return.

3 Seconds To Make The Right Impression

So how you can retain visitors and grab them as soon as they view the homepage of your website? Well, try condensing the key selling points of your business. Why are you different? Why should they do business with you as opposed to anyone else?

A lot of businesses also lose sight of the fact that their homepage should not only convey what the business is about but also what the website is about. What can visitors do on the website? What types of information can they find here?

What are the best things about the website? If you don't convey all these vital messages quickly via the homepage people will not stick around trying to find the answers themselves deeper within the site.

Put Yourself In The Shoes Of Your Customer

As with many marketing approaches the key here is to take a step back and imagine yourself as a customer viewing the homepage for the first time. What would you want to see? Perhaps client comments to instil a sense of trust. Or maybe press clippings that illustrate the profile and respectability of the company?

Whatever you decide to place on the homepage keep it snappy. Less is more. It's a cliché but it holds 100% true as far as your website's homepage is concerned.



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This post comes a bit late in the whole web 2.0 cycle. I feel that it bears repeating because I have come across sites that don't follow some basic principles when pulling in 3rd party data from sites such as flickr, twitter et. al.

APIs and data portability

The blessing of popular and easy to use APIs and the data portability of web 2.0 applications has had an unfortunate side effect, and that is that some implementations that use these services do not integrate appropriate contingency design should these 3rd party services fail.

Caching data calls to APIs is a good bit of contingency design. Many APIs will require caching - like that of Amazon - but I suspect this is intended to help limit resource use of the API host, not the site using the API. The reasons a person using API accessed data on their website would want to cache the data are:

  1. To speed up the load time of their website
  2. To have a back up plan if the API call fails

A simple implementation to handle those two cases would be one that caches an API call for a given amount of time and one that freshens stale cached data and triggers an error should an API call fail.

Caching is good contingency design practice

As I said above, this post is a bit late to the party but it is worth writing as recently I have come upon at least three sites where firebug and other widgets have revealed issues retrieving API fetched data and the site loading times have been horrible.

A decent implementation idea would be to roll your own caching wrapper and agnostically plug it in to a stable caching tool, perhaps something like Cache Lite for PHP. In this manner you have a reusable, caching library independent piece of code that can handle caching/flushing and refreshing of data which could function to handle the two cases discussed above.

And that's it. It's been 541 days since my last post. Wow. I hope this is a re-start of a new phase of blogging. Right, and it looks like I had not built the commenting functionality into this version of the site. What a surprise. I'd still like feedback so if anyone has any email me at mike at this domain and I'll pop a comment right into the database. Off to build some commenting functionality... Comments should be working now.



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