14 TIPS FOR A HOMEPAGE DESIGN THAT CAPTIVATES VISITORS TO YOUR WEBSITE

Having a nice new homepage design is a great thing, but what about website visitors? Do visitors stay with you on the website? And more importantly, will the visitors come back to you after their first visit?

So is your website design "sticky" that your visitors are stuck with you?

To make one thing clear in advance: sticky websites are not about creating any technical hurdles for website visitors, such as wild popups or similar nonsense. The point is that he himself is motivated to stay on the side and to come back again. For the professional website, you must have to take web designing services from a well known company.

So what can you do specifically with your homepage design so that a visitor stays on your website as long as possible and does not immediately disappear into the vastness of the network?

Homepage design with simple and clear navigation

If you spend a long time with your own website, you will of course know all the contents and all navigation paths more or less by heart. It can quickly be attractive to incorporate even more angles in the form of submenu items or other special pages. Better not do it very carefully, if at all.

Think of the website visitor who comes to you for the first time. Try to put her in it. They want to see at first glance what's going on, what awaits them on your website.

A website does not need a thousand features and frills that distract users, but instead a clear and simple navigation.

Therefore, set up a central navigation bar. The top level should immediately show the most important content of your website and should not contain more than 5 to 7 navigation points. Why only 5 to 7?

There are now a number of so-called usability tests that have shown that in a short time most people can no longer record and sort for themselves. Group your content as conclusively as possible and pack additional navigation points in the second navigation level or in the footer menu. Don't make me think!

Professional website design

A visitor's decision, whether they like your website or not, is largely made subconsciously within seconds. And as with people or things in real life, the exterior plays a major role here

So if a new visitor comes to you and sees a smorgasbord of wildly cobbled together graphics, small-scale text deserts and confused color worlds, he quickly pulls away again.

A good homepage design is therefore extremely important - and not just for the first impression, good design also enhances your content. That means that a text or a product presentation in the context of a professionally designed website is subconsciously rated very differently than the same text on a poorly designed website.

Bring personality to your website

People prefer to connect with people rather than with anonymous constructs. A truism, but this insight is not heeded on many websites. It's really one of the easier ways to make your website sticky.

The extent to which you want to put your own person in the foreground on the website depends, of course, on your own personality and the purpose of the website. Of course, a coach or a consultant has to rely much more on his person than, for example, a B2B website for machine parts.

Nevertheless, it is worthwhile for every website operator to consider whether there are personal aspects that would make sense to bring to the website. If there are photos of the team or individual employees who are responsible for customer communication, these would certainly strengthen the bond with potential customers if they were also shown on the website.

Or if there is an interesting story of the management or other people in the company, it is always an occasion to bring it to the website.

Sticky content

As banal as it is, nothing works without good content. You can have a great website design and offer features in abundance - as long as the visitor does not feel attracted to the real content, as long as the content does not help, it will be difficult to keep.

The first priority must be really good content that hits the nerve of your target group.

The best content forward

If you have created good content for your website, be it in the form of blog posts, services or product presentations, do not hide it somewhere in the navigation thicket. Pick out your best content and try to make it as prominent as possible on your website.

In my personal blog about bootstrapping, tools and virtual company there is, for example, a section in the sidebar with the most read articles. So every reader can find the most popular content straight away, which in turn encourages them to click on.

Link similar content

A similar way to present website visitors with suitable content that they like to look at and thus stay on the page for longer is to display similar content.

Everyone knows it from Amazon: Readers who bought this book also bought these books. You can do the same with your website content:

Show for each product or any products similar products or items . Fortunately, you don't have to do this manually, because there are a number of very practical plugins.

Track Your Readers' Habits

The more you know about your website visitors and their behavior on your website, the better you can prepare for it and make your page more and more sticky.

So rely on an analysis tool like Google Analytics to see how many visitors come to your page when, where they come from, how long they look at which individual pages , and between which pages they click back and forth. And that's just a little foretaste: Depending on your individual needs, Google Analytics can provide you with a number of other analyzes, on the basis of which you can gradually improve your website.

Offer subscription options (of course free of charge)

The fact that a visitor comes back is usually due to new good content. The question arises: is it not enough to just publish this content? The answer is clear: no!

Don't expect visitors who have surfed your site to come back later on their own initiative. Some users do this, but the majority would probably forget your page despite good content. After all, the range of content and communication options on the Internet is gigantic.

It is teeming with offers of all stripes and quality. Many people quickly lose the overview here, and even bookmarks become worthless due to their sheer mass. What does that mean for you as a website operator?

On the one hand, create occasions to return. And, on the other hand, make sure that your visitors also notice the new publications.

This is partly a question of the right timing, but above all a question of the technical possibilities that they offer your visitors in the form of a kind of subscription.

In any case, such a subscription should be free of charge and can be technically different. It is best to use several of the options listed below.

Link social media profiles

If you have social media profiles parallel to your website, for example on Facebook, Google+ or Twitter, then it is best to link them with your complete homepage design:

Install the corresponding social media buttons to follow in the respective channel on your website. In this way, a website visitor can link to their social media profiles.

If there is something new on your website, post it on your social media channels. This way your “followers” ​​will be informed and will therefore come back to your site - of course always on condition that you also offer really interesting content.

RSS button

By clicking on the RSS button on your page, your website visitor subscribes to the news on your page for his so-called “RSS reader”. Your new posts will appear regularly with him alongside the other news from the pages of interest to him.

So you do not have to do anything else to inform the user about new things, because they will receive the updates automatically.

Not every mainstream user knows RSS, but above all technology-savvy users use this technology.

Email newsletter

Email marketing is often underestimated, but still very effective . Integrate a newsletter system, such as Cleverreach or MyMail, and offer the user an easy way to leave his email address with you.

This way he receives an email every time you publish something new, although you can of course freely define the frequency for the emails. This should also be chosen carefully, because email marketing is a sensitive topic. Nobody wants to be flooded with mail, let alone get spam.

So treat the addresses entrusted to you as carefully as possible and only write to them if there is really something new that can benefit your subscribers.

Why so many options?

With the social media channels, the RSS stream and email marketing, the user now really has a whole range of subscription options at their disposal, all of which should largely have the same purpose. But why so many channels, is not a single one enough?

The answer to that is actually quite simple. From a purely technical point of view, a subscription option would suffice. But you know it from yourself: Everyone has their own habits and systems to get news. And by taking this into account, you can easily increase the likelihood that a website visitor will follow your site’s news.

Place the subscription options highlighted

Options not only have to exist, they also have to be shown accordingly. Put the subscription options on your website in the most prominent positions so that they are used. “Call to action” is the key word when it comes to guiding users to where they can take action.

For example, it makes sense to use the subscription buttons in the top right and / or in the sidebar of the page. If you publish blog posts or similar, you can also refer to the subscription options at the end of each post.

Offer additional incentives to stay tuned

To give the whole thing a kick, so-called "freebies" are available. These are free additions that every user gets when subscribing to the newsletter.

Conclusion

There is certainly no shortage of technical possibilities when it comes to making your homepage design sticky. Use these options so that unique visitors to your website become permanent guests.

But also uses the necessary sensitivity to really only offer your users useful content instead of clumsy advertising.

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