If you’re wondering why nobody “reads” your website as if it was their favourite newspaper or magazine, please take 4 minutes to read this article. Also, if you have an additional minute, go looking for a newspaper in your home/office and take a look at the homep… pardon!, I meant “front page”.
In 5 minutes we’ll teach you how to improve your website homepage and, hopefully, your sales conversion rate.
1. Use white space
Why is white space so hated? Simple: many website owners still believe that white space makes the homepage longer, hence users have to scroll down a lot before finding the appropriate information.
This has been proved in the last few years, and if you visit some of the most recent websites you’ll find out that communicating all the information in the “top fold” (i.e. visible area of the homepage) is impossible.
2. Use high contrast text
First of all. If you still believe people don’t scroll, you just did 🙂 Sorry for insisting!
By the way, this is the right time to open a newspaper and take a look at what they do. Have you ever seen a newspaper with black background and white font? Have you ever seen a newspaper front page with small, light headlines? Have you ever seen a newspaper page without pictures in colour?
High contrast drives attention. If you want your website readers to focus on your content, make sure the font is BLACK enough and the background is WHITE enough so then it can be read.
Our eyes are used to read dark text on light background – therefore other colour combinations are way less legible than the standard one! If you can’t avoid coloured backgrounds, make sure you find the right high-contrast colour combination for your font.
Also, and more importantly, don’t use “bold” font everywhere. Pick your most important word or short sentence of the paragraph, don’t bold the whole paragraph or nothing will really stand out!
3. Use BIG headlines
The reason why newspapers use headlines is very simple: they drive attention, tease the user, and get her/him to read the article. There is no need to say more.
Not only you need to use headlines for your readers, headlines (or headings) are very useful for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). In the same way users quickly scan the homepage headlines, the search engines analyse your headings to “describe” your website. If you place your main keywords in your headlines/headings, there are good chances Google, Yahoo and Bing will rank your website high for those keywords.
Wow, you can help both your readers and your SEO ranking with just a simple headline! 🙂