Factors For A Good Homepage Design
There’s no quick-and-dirty formula for a good homepage design.
As the foundation of your specific web presence and a reflection of your business, a quality homepage is going to look different for every ecommerce merchant. But there are elements common to every homepage, and investigating each of them individually can indicate whether your homepage is generally doing its job or not.
1. Color schemes
Color is one of the first things we notice about websites. If you were able to flash your homepage in front of a consumer, even for just a glance, they’d likely be able to tell you its color. Choosing a color scheme isn’t as simple as just copying your brand’s palette. You need to consider readability, consistency, and the photos or other visuals you’ll be pairing it with.
Can consumers easily read the text on your homepage? Are the colors easy to look at with your eyes? Are you using color to send and highlight important contact information? What if the consumer is colorblind? These are the important elements that you should carefully take into consideration when designing your homepage.
2. CTAs
Call-to-actions are the key elements on your homepage. All of the other elements – the layout, the copy, the design – are simply guiding the user to follow that CTA, and ushering them down the path to purchase. Your homepage may have many CTAs, each one with their own priority level. For example, the homepage may call for users to view new products or sign up for your newsletter.
Which one is more important to your business? Does your homepage design reflect that?
3. Value proposition
What are you selling? Why buy it from you?
If the homepage of your online store doesn’t fully answer those two questions as clearly and compactly as possible, it’s not doing its job. This is the value you’re offering to the consumers, and if you’re not demonstrating it from the beginning, you’re basically buying them a one-way ticket out of your online store.
Most believe that clear, obvious value propositions are made by strong, engaging copy and while that’s absolutely essential, a well-crafted user experience plays a role that’s just as vital.
Speaking as a copywriter, choosing the language and verbiage that will occupy the homepage doesn’t happen as easily as you think. It’s a collaborative effort with the UX designer, both of them must have the skills needed to achieve the same goal: demonstrate the value proposition.
4. Site speed
Despite it being such a key factor to the customer’s experience, we usually keep our website developers accountable for a site’s speed. Your site’s performance will depend on the development team, while the designers play a role as well.
While fast loading times are always desirable, it’s especially important for the homepage. Designers need to take extra care to ensure the page they’re crafting is one that can be loaded almost instantly. In practice, that can mean limiting the size or amount of high resolution images on the page.
Animations and other interactive design elements can spruce up any digital experience, but too many will bog down the site speed, no matter how good your dev team is. The speed of your homepage will vary by user and their device, but as a general rule of thumb, anything longer than a two second load time is an issue that needs to be addressed.
