Your website homepage is the first glimpse many potential customers will have of your brand, so enticing them to stay on the site and have a look around is crucial to converting browsers into buyers.
If the page takes too long to load or looks cluttered you may well lose a customer to another site, as they just can’t find what they are looking for.
Web users don’t tend to read large blocks of text, so keep the message snappy.
Don’t use too many graphics or load videos on the homepage as they can take an age to appear, they may show off your products well but it’s all in vein if the site is not fast to load, clear and easy to use.
Load times:
Your website homepage is the first glimpse many potential customers will have of your brand.
Therefore, enticing them to stay on the site and have a look around is crucial to converting browsers into buyers.
If the page takes too long to load or looks cluttered you may well lose a customer to another site, as they just can’t find what they are looking for.
Web users don’t tend to read large blocks of text, so keep the message snappy.
Don’t use too many graphics or load videos on the homepage as they can take an age to appear, they may show off your products well but it’s all in vain if the site is not fast to load, clear and easy to use.
NB: This How To series is authored by Marcus Brennand of Digital Marmalade
About Special Nodes
Just like the article suggests the start page is often of paramount importance for how the visitor will perceive your offer and your brand. You need a good structure with an intuitive navigation. In addition you should work with keywords which may trigger the visitor to venture deeper into the site.
Don’t entirely rule out graphics and video. After all there is a reason that TV is a larger consumed media than for instance print. Graphics and videos are simply easier to consume. Still images of course needs to be optimised to be used on the web. And don’t display them all at once either or your visitor will be confused.
To give you an idea of download times, the start page of Tnooz have images of about 1 MB of size (the entire site is about 2.5 MB including CSS, HTML and scripts). The images alone would take approximately 15 seconds (the entire site about 25 sec) to download using a T1-line (~1,5 Mbit) which is becoming increasingly rare. Today most cell phones sports internet connection higher than that speed.