How to simplify homepage elements? Inbound approach of designing!

by Tayyab

Posted on May 16, 2014

Today, it is not difficult to create a website for a business to expand business globally but it is difficult to create website that speaks directly to your dream customers. Most of the time, the design and development of a website are done in a short time but it lacks many aspects of customer interest as well as search engine optimization. This is the reason the sales and marketing are unable to achieve their goals in longer run.

Every journey has its starting point so does a website, ‘A Homepage’. A fact mostly overlooked about homepage; a homepage wears many hats and serves the exact interests of the dream customers. The importance of a well designed homepage is as important as is the first meeting of a Sales person with a prospect. A well designed homepage also helps marketing department to achieve their Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-based Goals.

If you are in the process of designing your homepage or already have a homepage of your website, give it a look and ask yourself a few questions:

• Does your homepage help the marketing to achieve SMART goals?
• Does your homepage speak to the dream customer?
• Does your homepage add any Value to the dream customer?
• Is your homepage S.E.O friendly?

And last but not the least,

• Does your homepage cover all the critical elements necessary for a homepage?

Critically examine these elements and you’ll probably be disappointed to find many of them missing. Don’t over-indulge yourself in utter disappointment for there is always a solution right around the corner.

Upon giving a second look on the pointers above, you’ll be able to have a clear perspective that homepage of a website has to be able to achieve many objectives at once.

Seems difficult?

Not exactly!

It is important to mention here that if things are well planned in advance it will help to implement your strategy step-by-step. If not then, hand the whole thing over to someone else who can execute the tasks as per the requirements. Let us dig deep into the statements one by one and see how simple it is to make things possible.

Set SMART Goals before design and development:

It is mostly observed that websites are handed to design and development without setting SMART goals for business and marketing. This is the main culprit in the whole process. It creates a lot of ambiguity in aligning the website to convert and retain customers without having a clear business objective. The importance of creating business objectives and goals must be the foremost task before even starting to think about going online. Once you have created business objectives and goals the second step is to create SMART marketing goals as it is one of the most effective ways of high achievers to achieve their goals – realistically and consistently.

Myth of user & SEO perspectives and homepage design:

For me it’s really fun to design the homepage of a site. Definitely, I always first create business objectives and goals and later create SMART marketing goals. Once I am done with them, my next step is guided by the Inbound Marketing Methodology. Inbound, in short, is about caring by sharing the valuable content that appeals to your dream customers, attract qualified prospects to your business and retain them. This doesn’t mean that you forget about SEO perspective in design. The way I do this is to blend the visitor’s perspective with SEO perspective. This helps me to keep the design in user and SEO perspective simultaneously. Once I have defined business objectives and marketing goals I step forward to take care of the critical elements of a homepage.

12 critical homepage elements to better “lead” dream customer:

Jassica Meher from HubSpot well defined 12 critical homepage elements in 2012. The beauty of these elements is that they are still so critical to adopt even in 2014.

“In order for a homepage to work, it needs to meet its purpose and contain key elements that attract traffic, educate your visitors, and convert browsers into buyers.”

I myself have found these 12 points very critical and always prefer them to be found on every homepage I am about to design. Once I am done with all these points I always like to have an in-house opinion about the design so to further improve it and this I learnt from Avinash Kaushik 2 years back. Dig deeper into these points and implement them on your homepage using the blend of User perspective with SEO.

You can find the points below to make your process of homepage designing and developing simple and more convertible.
Good Luck!

Tayyab