Functions of Your Business Site’s 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.  That is probably the page that contains an “order now” button or a prospect lead form.  However, in most cases the home page will attract more first time visitors than any other single page on your site.

Your home will be the page to which more outside links point than any other of your pages.  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 simply means that your visitors will use your home page more than it might merit, although I took a circuitous route to get to that conclusion.  As long as your prospects are loitering there, you better make sure you help them make good use of their time.

That brings us to our central question, which is what are the purposes of a well constructed home page in an intelligently constructed Internet business website?  Here are a few functions from which you can choose, although never try to use one page to do everything.

*  Serve as the foyer for your international corporate office and reflect the corporate climate, whether that is formal and efficient or relaxed and friendly.

*  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.  They visit some sites which want to give away information, others which want their contact information and still others that want them to buy a product or contract for a service.

*  Keep the whole place neat and tidy, making it attractive without seeming pretentious.

Those are some of the things to keep in mind for your home page, whether you already have a large, authority site or you are planning to build a small business website.