Your Home Page: Placemat or Buffet?

It’s time to take a hard look at your home page, where your customers and prospects come knocking, hungry for information and answers. So when they get to http://www.YourCompany.com, do they find a placemat or a buffet?

If you have what I call a “placemat” home page, you’re missing huge opportunities. A “placemat” is a big photo (or worse, an ad!) that fills up the monitor, some navigation, and maybe a clickable icon or two. But front and center is a big beautiful shot of the product or lifestyle you are so in love with (or that you paid so much for) that you want to share it with the world! So you “set” your home page like a table for a special occasion, all pretty but not too cluttered. It’s well balanced, tasteful, and conveys your company image.

The problem with these lovely scenes is that they are freeloaders on your marketing budget, contributing nada to your potential earnings! Plus, they annoy your visitors. They know you sell cars—do you have to hit them over the head with one? Here you’ve spent $$$$$ for a web site, and the first thing you do is bore your visitors to death. Or worse, they don’t see what they need, so they leave.

But what about all that slick navigation you draped across the top or sides of the page? Necessary, but do you really expect your visitors to always recognize the path to exactly what they need through one- or two-word clues? Nav bars and menus by nature are telegraphic: Contact Us, About, Special Offers…some of those are sufficient no-brainers. But what about these gold mines: Products, Services, What’s New, Join Us…yeah, a visitor can see what they are, but why aren’t you telling them why they should click here now? Because you don’t have the space. You don’t want to clutter your placemat!

Which is why your home page needs to be a buffet. By “buffet” I mean you set out all kinds of goodies as a bountiful feast so your visitors are immediately enticed, engaged, and hungry to dig around. Most importantly, if they come looking for specific info, you can show them exactly where to find it because you’re not held hostage by a two-word limit. Instead of tapping out Morse code you can shout out all the great news and ideas you spent months putting together for their edification!

A hard-working home page has smaller photos (add a “click to enlarge” link if you want), headlines, summary blurbs, and links, all arranged in a grid and grouped by topic or subsets, so visitors can scan your page, find tasty bits, and dig in. When you set out your buffet, however, you still need to exercise restraint. Don’t tell stories in their entirety. Brief but clear summaries with relevant headlines should then link to site pages for the full story.

News media and variety show web sites are the best examples of this approach. You can learn lots by visiting sites for CNN, MSNBC, Newsweek, Oprah, Martha Stewart, and so on. Just be warned, as you “research” you will probably get sucked in to clicking on stories and articles that pique your interest. Great! Just go back and look at how they did it. Then load your home page with all the goodies in your web site content.