There are many tips regarding best home page design practices, but we would love to talk about the major goal of the design and the real metrics that verify if design is working for the brand or not.
The only thing that we consider as important is conversions. Conversion rate is a metric that shows you how many percentages of the site visitors do the specific actions that you want then to do.
While different sites have different goals – some sites lead visitor to specific page, some force user to fill a contact or request a quote form - but the most critical conversion challenges appear for businesses that build the whole business income right from the internet, for example ecommerce projects.
We would try to combine all pieces of the ecommerce puzzle into one article and describe what helps you design site for better conversions.
Step 1 – Design the top navigation.
Remember that navigation helps user to quickly release the most important things. The navigation needs to highlight the logo, specific tag line.
Remember to put there clear message about your refund / delivery policy and of course the customer support number needs to be there.
If you have a special deal or offer, kindly try to keep this information visible on different pages. Remember to put shipping cart basket with pretty visible checkout button.
Visitors need to be able to proceed to checkout easy, so more time you spend on the cart helps client get to the checkout quickly.
Also it is important to highlight specific menu items from the remaining navigation; that helps a lot when you want to promote exclusive categories. You can use pretty basic styles, like to increase font size, change font shapes or change colors for this specific menu category.
Use mouse-over effect for menu, highlight selected categories, and correctly activate top navigation once selected. Search field is supposed to work with auto-suggest.
Step 2 – Design a slideshow.
While many of brands use gallery on home page, we strongly recommend to think about it before you start using slideshows for your own site.
From the research of many ecommerce projects we realized that more slides you have, the less customer focuses on real things.
For example, different projects heatmap study shows that the second slide gets only 50% of visitor attention while next one drops attention to even less than 20%.
More than 3 slides not only slowdown the page but never get any transactions.
The alternative ways to get information presented to visitors is to create one slide with 3 offers combined together – this not only helps you track the offers / clicks to specific offer, but also speeds up the page, cut offs unnecessary JS code and do more for your store.
Step 3 – Featured products or brands.
Most of sites use predefined functionality of shopping carts and showcase featured product sections, but only few sites really analyze the data and correctly select what needs to be highlighted on the page.
Before you decide what data is best to highlight, kindly check the Google Analytics profile. Sections we suggest to analyze – the most visited pages. In many cases you would be able to identify 10-20 products, 5-10 brands that visitors check out more than others.
For example, following brands we discovered for one of our clients:
This data automatically helps to decide what models we need to put on the home page to simplify navigation.
Its good idea to add some scrolling options to scroll the watches left-right. You may showcase 5 brands randomly and track what brands get more clicks, so show case brands with better CTR first.
Remember, if you are selling products of well-know brands, use brand logo and sexy product photos with no watermark.
Step 4 – Most sold products
Analyze what models are best-sold with the help of Google Analytics. Keep them on the home page. Use discount labels in different colors.
Also small labels like New-, Recommended- will be helpful if you want to draw visitor’s attentions to a specific model.
Step 5 – Final touches
You can collect the most frequently asked questions from your support and reply to those questions in a very professional way.
Store reviews, ratings, presence on eBay, Amazon stores – key to get immediate trust of your visitors.
Also, if you have already pretty nice community on Facebook, you may simply create a widget and embed the faces of your clients – that helps me find friends that I’m following on Facebook.
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