Your Business Website: Purposes of the Home Page

As the page’s nickname indicates, your home page is extremely important to you.  Playing with an old Tony Bennett song about San Francisco, you want your sites visitors to leave their hearts there.  Okay, I’ll apologize for that.

In fact though, for most business websites, the home page is far from the most important.  The page that earns the honor of being most important is probably one or two click removed from the home page.  It is the one on which a converted visitor can perform an action that directly or eventually will lead to the company earing revenue.  On the other hand, the home page is probably the page that will attract more first time traffic than any other page on your business site.

Assuming that you have followed a traditional link building plan, more external links will be directed to your home page than any other.  Also, more than likely, your home page will be close to the top in terms of the number of internal links directed to it.  Should your visitors lose their way, due either to taking a wrong turn or due to poor design by your website’s architect, they probably will return to the home page to serve as their base of operations in order to launch another quest.

That’s all a rather long way of saying that a lot of your visitors are going to spend a lot of their time on your website’s home page.  While they’re there, you might as well make good use of them and their time.

What are the purposes of a well constructed home page in an effectively constructed Internet business site?  Here are a few functions from which you can choose, although never try to use one page to do everything.

*  Provide a corporate office atrium to set the mood for your business’ corporate climate–laid back and informal, or efficient and orderly or however else you position the company.

*  Provide directional signs to all of the locations that your most prized customers are likely to want to visit.  Of course, your navigation menu will provide this service on all of your site’s pages, but, since this is often the first visit by many of your guests, the home page is an opportunity to help them understand the road maps that you will regularly provide.

*  Assure that the business’s mission is clearly communicated.

*  Tell your visitors what you want them to do.  You might want them to buy a product, sign up to receive valuable information, learn about the topic in which your business is the expert or even all of those.

*  Make a favorable first impression by picking up the clutter; create an attractive but unpretentious space.

Those are some of the functions to consider for any business home page, regardless of whether you already have a large, established, authority site or you are planning to build a small business website.