Your Home page as your window display

Shoppers gaze into store and office windows as they’re walking by on the sidewalk or in a mall. Business owners invest time and money into preparing those window displays to entice people in. Online, the same process happens — except that shoppers let their mouse do the walking for them. Our Home pages are our storefront windows, and the Back button is the way to move on to the next display. Like larger stores, websites have a number of entrances. And like shoppers in a department store, not all online shoppers go to the main entrance. But the Home page is the most common entry point with most websites. Visitors who enter via a different page are likely to click on the Home page link because they expect to find important information there. How can we prepare our online window displays to draw in more shoppers? The answer depends in part on the type of site we have. Websites about services need different features on the Home page than sites selling products do. Informational sites are different again. With each type of site, though, we need to work with layout and content.

Web page layout

Eyetracking studies show that when people land on a web page, their eyes move to these page items:

• Headlines
• Headings and subheads
• The logo
• The menu
• Captions

Eyes are also drawn to the top left corner of the screen. From there, they tend to move across the screen, down and across the screen again, and then down the left side of the screen, following the shape of a capital letter F. The bottom right part of the screen gets noticed the least.

To get the most use from our online window displays, we should put our most important items along the lines of the F. Good use of headings, captions, and other items that draw attention help highlight our display items.

Most of the F pattern falls "above the fold," a term borrowed from newspapers. Newspaper publishers put their more important content above the newspaper fold, where it’s more likely to be noticed and read. With websites, the term "above the fold" refers to what site visitors can see when they land at the site, before scrolling down.

Having most of the content above the fold is thought to be less important now that websites and scrolling are as common as walking past store windows. But if we want to be sure that something will be noticed, we can give it more exposure by placing it above the fold.

Home page layout

Most website pages have their own focus. In contrast, the Home page is a window to the rest of the site. Long chunks of text don’t belong here. Short introductions to the various sections with links to them show visitors what the site is about at a glance and help them find specific sections and pages.

Even if we aren’t selling anything on this page, calls to action are still useful to move visitors into the site. For example, "Read more" and "Subscribe now" invite visitors to do more than just skim the page.

Home page content

When people land on a site’s Home page, their typical questions are something like these:

• What is the purpose of this site?
• Is this site credible?
• Does this site have what I’m looking for?
• Why should I spend time at this site rather than at other sites in the search results?

If we’re selling products, the site purpose will be clear from the links. If we have more than a few products, organizing them into categories makes them easier to find and provides more headings and keywords for the Home page.

Sites about services or organizations need more text content to show their purpose. A brief introduction is all that’s needed and the About page is for details.

We can establish credibility in different ways:

• Name and link to professional organizations we belong to
• Display the logo for any awards won
• Link to a Testimonials page or have a rotating script display up to a few testimonials at a time
• Provide a money-back guarantee
• Have professional-quality design, layout, and content

When the Home page provides an overview of the site, includes links to sections and pages, and has an easy-to-find Search box, visitors will be able to determine fast if the site fits what they’re looking for. The items we display on our online window may or may not include exactly what they’re looking for. But the range will probably tell visitors if they should look further at this site.

What makes our service, company, or organization different from others? What do we offer besides credibility and our service or product range? Features such as no-obligation quotes, free shipping, discounts for certain items, a toll-free order line, and quality customer service merit a place on the Home page.

Store window displays are changed often to reflect what’s currently in the store. By doing the same, we can direct attention to our best-selling items and special offers, provide up-to-date news, and give visitors a reason to return to this page.