Optimizing your homepage is not an artform or blackbox activity. It is a skill that can be learned. Further, its principles ought to be known and understood by anyone who supervises website management.
An excellent starting point is a webinar conducted by Marketing Experiments entitled Homepage Design: The five most common pitfalls and how to overcome them. Click on this link to view the entire video. Here's a summary of the 5 pitfalls and what you will learn. This presentation is packed with actual, live optimizations and statistical data:
- Trying to achieve too many objectives – It is critical that you use visual elements to focus the visitor on a small number of initial objectives, so that the visitor is not confused about what they can do on your site.
- Failing to start a conversation – If the homepage is where you start a relationship with your visitor, that’s where you need to start the conversation, the most natural way to introduce yourself and get the visitor interested in what you have to offer, within the first few seconds
- Over-reliance on multimedia to communicate value – Anything you can say through video or audio, you can say quicker and more efficiently with text; do use multimedia, but don’t rely on it to communicate, especially in those precious first seconds of your interaction with the visitor. Your visitors are probably not patient enough to wait for even a one-minute video to explain why they should stay on your site.
- Making the homepage a landing page – If you have more than one offer (even if it’s one product, but one with options), your homepage cannot look like a “sell” landing page; its job is to direct the visitor to the right product as quickly and efficiently as possible…and then let the subsequent page(s) do the selling.
- Assuming best practices will work for you – best practices, even if they work in most cases, don’t work in every case. You must test your pages, including homepages, to determine whether any change or intended “optimization” actually had a positive effect. Industries, products, and traffic channels are different in each situation, and the results may surprise you.