This is a follow-up to our previous post about Website Homepage Layout. In that post we discussed our OLD website homepage and all of the problems that it had.
It was missing a number of elements on it. So we broke it down step by step and decided to do it publicly so that we could show you some examples of what was happening with it and how we changed it. Now that we showed the problems, it’s time to show the solutions or Website Homepage Tips.
Solution #1 – Website Summary
Previous – We did not have one. We just had a headline. Now our summary is:
A digital marketing company that can help you;
- Build an online presence
- Optimize your content
- Convert traffic to customers
- Drive traffic to your website
Now THAT tells you what we do in a few seconds. It’s concise, it’s not hard to understand (or weighted down by terminology), and answers the question… “What do you do?”
Solution #2 – An Easy Design
We didn’t do too much with this one as the design is pretty clean. The font is readable and it looks nice. The one thing that was a problem was the main image (the first one that people see when they land on the site). Previously it was a number of images that you had to decipher in order to understand what we were trying to say.
Our solution was to just simplify it and put a number of devices with our logo on it to help tell a story of what we do. We work with websites. Pretty straight forward.
Solution #3 – Navigation
Our previous navigation bar had 9 tabs on it and we thought that it could be cleaned up a bit (or simplified). With the revamp of the front page taking people to the specific services that we now do, we were able to get rid of the Web Service button, but we now know that we need to put that one back as people need to find that particular page from other sections of our website.
But we also got rid of the portfolio section and just put it in another part of our site. Some people would say that is a bad idea, but the main section of our business right now is not so much the web design as much as it is web marketing. We are really trying to get away from a lot of web design. So if people ask me about our web design portfolio, we can still refer them to that page.
In the end, we still will have 8 tabs, but at least we’re cutting it down a bit.
Solution #4 – A Great Headline
Our previous headline was “What do you want your website to do?” Personally I really liked this, but it didn’t tell anything about our business or what we do. As of right now it has been changed to the same thing as in Solution #1.
I still like the other headline better (our old one), but I will split test this over time and see which one performs better. Just because I like it doesn’t mean that I’m going to choose it over a clear cut winner of a test. I like to let statistics do the decision making.
Solution #5 – Calls to Action
The previous problem before was that there was not one single call to action. We have remedied that with our green Learn More buttons. They are simple, tell people what to do (and where to click), and the green contrasts a bit with the site so that people can easily find it, but it doesn’t look too ugly.
Over time we will test these buttons with other colors and other calls to action… click here, find out more, read more, etc.
Solution #6 – Keywords
Our keywords were non existent before because we had changed the front page and the content and not optimized it for the original keywords (or new ones either).
Now we have done that with the main keyword of “Digital Marketing Experts”. It’s still ridiculously competitive, but let’s people (and the search engines) know what we do. We pull most of our traffic in from other pages anyway.
Solution #7 – How Our Process Works
On our old homepage, we did not have a process. We did a poor job of letting people know exactly what we did and we also did not tell them how that process happened.
Now we lay that process out below the headline.
- We can help build you an online presence
- We then optimize your site
- We can help you convert your traffic to sales
- Then we drive more traffic to your site
And this is the order that we do this in. Sure, we can probably go a bit into more detail, but right now we are more worried about having a process than what we previously had (nothing).
Solution #8 – How to Contact Us
We did not do too much here as we have our phone number in the header, contact info on the sidebar and again on the footer.
One thing we did do is after you click on the service pages, there are very specific calls to action there (blue button to the right). They tell people exactly what to do to get to the next step in the process.
Solution #9 – Testimonials
We already had these before, but they were blending a bit into the background. We just tried to break them off from the rest of the content a bit by putting a line above the testimonial and then again below it.
Also, we added a Click to See Other Testimonials link to show people that we have a lot more of these (as they are usually highly seen on a website).
Website Homepage Tips Conclusion
There was a great deal that we changed from one homepage to the other. In just over 24 hours since we put the new homepage up, we are starting to see a 33% higher clickthrough rate (which is already positive), but we need a lot more traffic to show the true results. But so far, our website homepage tips seem to be working.
We will update that here (at a later date) and on some later posts to show the effectiveness of our efforts.