It is vitally essential to have a well-structured homepage in your website. When someone visits your website, the homepage web design will serve as their first impression of your business. This page functions as a preview of your offerings, and visitors will likely decide whether or not to convert based on what they see. They will seek information regarding what you sell, why it is pertinent to them, and how they can benefit from your products or services. Consequently, how should this information be structured?

As a web design agency, we are aware that there is much more to attracting visitors to your contact page or purchasing your product than simply describing your offerings. It is all about directing the visitor to the desired location.

Although there is no one-size-fits-all approach to enhancing the visitor experience on a website’s homepage, the following recommendations should work well for the majority of businesses.

For the sake of brevity, this post will focus on two primary topics: the structure and content of the home page, and the best practices for scanning content, which are supported by extensive research.

There are numerous ways to design and organize the content on your homepage, and this will vary depending on the nature of your business. A creative film agency may only wish to promote its portfolio samples, whereas a tourist destination may wish to emphasize its search functionality. But for many typical enterprises, there is typically a tried-and-true hierarchy that operates as follows:

We’ll assume that your company has a decent logo and logical navigation, which are typically located in the horizontal top section of the site.

From a marketing perspective, you’ll need an engaging and problem-solving one-sentence tagline (tip: don’t say “Welcome to our website” – it serves no actual purpose!).

Now that you have a catchy tagline, you may want to select an image that represents the message you’re attempting to convey. This can be accomplished solely through typography, but for the majority of cases, a complementary image will enhance the impact of your message.

Your tagline can be supplemented with a sentence that explains what you offer in greater detail, and a call to action can also be placed in this section for visitors who are already familiar with your website or recognize that you offer precisely what they need and wish to contact you. In theory, your tagline may be so persuasive that it’s all they need to take action, but in practice, you’ll need to provide more.

This can be organized in a variety of methods. Commonly, strap line text is aligned to the left or centered on banner images. Here are some excellent examples of persuasive introduction sections that you can use as models:

ClickUp emphasizes the fact that their product will simplify matters. This effective heading is accompanied by a screenshot of their software’s main features.

Adobe encourages site visitors to investigate the capabilities of its well-known software.

Now that the visitor is interested in your service or product, they may wish to browse down and learn more.

In this second section, you should advertise your services or products and elaborate on what you can offer to solve their problem. Resist the temptation to go into great detail about your products or services at this juncture and stick to a general overview.

In a typical circumstance, you may wish to promote a number of essential services or products. This could initially be displayed in simple columns with imagery that corresponds to the offering. Avoid visual clutter and maintain enticing messages and consistent imagery for each service.

Think about the rhythm of this section

You want to allure visitors to your website and direct them to the appropriate pages. User flow should be considered from the very beginning of your homepage, but it’s even more important to direct visitors to the appropriate pages once you’ve introduced your product or service in greater detail.

Nota bene: ‘user flow’ should not be confounded with ‘user voyage’, which is more commonly used. This user flow is on a more granular level, typically on a website or application, whereas the user journey is a series of steps typically across channels to achieve a high-level business objective. As described by the Nelson Group here.

Apple frequently modifies the homepage’s primary offerings. This example demonstrates that they are promoting their trade-in services, conference announcements, and new products, all of which correspond to recent advertising campaigns. They typically only advertise two important products in the homepage’s upper section.

The visual representation of Tap Adventures‘s services is obvious. It employs inspirational images and brief headings to create an inviting and approachable environment for site visitors.

Here is where you can convince your visitor to act. Your message should be plain and unambiguous regarding the next actions; accordingly, it should be brief and succinct.

Include social proof (testimonials) close to your call to action in order to instill confidence in your visitors. Again, do not overwhelm them with information and distract them in this section of the page. A single testimonial is often sufficient to instill confidence in the visitor in your service or product.

When you do construct a call to action, it must stand out and have a high contrast with the page’s background colors. Additionally, you do not want to overwhelm the visitor with too many calls to action, as this can cause confusion. In certain instances, a solitary call-to-action at the bottom of your homepage may be used to encourage interaction.

Fasthosts encourages site visitors to sign up for its inexpensive hosting services and displays its competitive pricing above the call to action.

Now that you have included your attention-grabbing introduction, the details of your offering, and the all-important call to action, you have the option of including any additional pertinent information to bolster your offering. This section should appear above the website’s footer and should have a strong color contrast with the footer’s content.

This may include crucial information that supports your product or service or information that establishes your company’s credibility. This section of the website could be crucial in convincing first-time visitors to contact you or make a purchase the next time they visit.

Canva presents the features and advantages of their platform that users may not be aware of.

The majority of businesses will be aware of the significance of optimizing their websites for mobile devices. When working with smaller screen sizes, it is advantageous to keep content plain in structure and concise in language. Providing each of the aforementioned sections in manageable portions will reduce the need for tedious browsing and frustration.

Even though breakpoints can be added (breakpoints can omit content that appears on a desktop site from a mobile version), if you keep your home page content as streamlined as possible and design it with the appropriate text and image proportions, it should function without issue on mobile devices.

On both desktop and mobile, the ‘Reinventing HR’ campaign is promoted on the Brighthr website. Graphically, the mobile version is reduced to emphasize the headline and call to action. In addition, they use distinct calls-to-action for desktop and mobile, as visitors on desktop and mobile may need to be directed in different directions throughout their website voyage.

We’ve discussed the type of content you should include on your homepage, but what’s the most effective way to make your content scannable and encourage visitors to engage with it?

Historically, designers have employed two prevalent techniques: the Z Pattern and the F Pattern.

The Z pattern is a common and effective method for navigating visitors through a website’s homepage. This strategy is fairly self-explanatory: arrange your information in a Z pattern from top left to bottom right, with the call to action as the concluding point.

The principle suggests that when perusing a typical website, your eyes are drawn to the logo in the upper left, then to a contact icon or sign-up section in the upper right, a description of the services in the banner areas as you gaze diagonally, and the call to action in the lower section. The following diagram illustrates the pattern:

Z design: A diagram that indicates the trajectory of your website’s content.

The first suggestion in this article emphasizes the significance of an upper section that frequently employs this technique in a relatively limited space. Here are a few examples of introduction sections that employ the z-pattern principle: