While you’re reading the next paragraph, imagine how hard it would be to figure out what to put on the homepage of a company like this:

GE is one of the biggest companies in the world: They’re currently 6th in the ‘Fortune 500′. Their annual tax return is the longest in the Unites States. The company is made up of several ‘groups’, each consisting of dozens of smaller companies. GE has a long history, and was founded by Thomas Edison.

Where would you begin to start? Imagine how complicated the homepage would need to be to get all of that across, to appeal to all of the different types of visitors.

Well - Here’s GE’s current homepage:

So how have they managed to keep it so simple, yet remain useful?

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‘The Halo Effect’ was popularised by a man called Edward Thorndike in 1920. He’d run a psychological study asking commanding officers how they’d rate their soldiers, & found that the ratings were almost totally polarised: A soldier either had ‘all good’ traits or ‘all bad’ traits. In reality, this was not because the soldiers were all good, or all bad. It was just that commanding officers had a tendency to recognise one particularly good trait (or one particularly bad) & extrapolate that to form their entire view of the soldier. ie. lots of black, lots of white, very little grey.

This is also often quoted as the reason behind those “tall, beautiful people are more likely to succeed” studies: On a rational level, we all recognise there’s no correlation between height/beauty & ability, but on an irrational level there is a correlation between height/beauty & perceived ability. Picture an imaginary successful person in your mind: How tall are they? How good looking?

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Since it first poked its head above the water, web developers, designers & marketers have argued over whether flash is the future of the web or whether it should be wiped off the planet. The rise of AJAX has softened this debate slightly & provided a third option, but flash is still used every day by people who don’t understand its limitations & is still cursed daily by those who don’t recognise its talents.

This article explains exactly what’s bad about flash, what’s good, and how best to use it…

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This is how the average web professional thinks about homepages:

1. It is the ‘entrance’ to a website
2. It should be the primary place on the website to ‘make an impression’
3. It’s the first page on the site visitors will see

Yet often visitors just don’t use the homepage in that way. Usually, it has quite a different role to that. Here’s a little example to prove the point:

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“Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful”

This was written by William Morris 125 years ago & famously quoted by Terence Conran as the principle guiding his Habitat stores. Words & design are the two primary elements of a website and, being one of the most celebrated designer/writers ever to have lived, William Morris’s words translate nicely to the web:

Is Everything On Your Site Useful?

• Make sure there is a reason behind every element of your primary pages - don’t just include things because you can, include them because they’re useful to you or to your visitors
• Does everything on your site help you to reach your goals?
• Do you know what each of your visitor segments is trying to do on your site? Can they achieve that?

Is Everything On Your Site Beautiful?

• Does your text & your design resonate with your audience?
• A visit to your site should be at least simple, and you should really be aiming for it to be an enjoyable experience (In a recent Forrester poll related to Holiday websites, 20% of participants said that bad site usability had caused them not to purchase online)
• The bottom line here is: If your site triggers positive emotions in your audience, they will spend more time there, keep returning, and recommend you to others

Occasionally when you look back through your website stats, you wonder “what did we do on that date that made our sales figures jump so much?” You may then spend the next hour or so digging through old emails & logs to try and work out what change you made that increased your sales/visitor numbers/page views (or - much worse - what you did that reduced your sales!)

There’s a really simple way to solve this problem. It takes all of 5 minutes to set up & will pay off for as long as your website exists (possibly longer):

Set Up A Website Change Log

It’s as simple as it sounds - set up a log (maybe in excel, maybe in a textfile, perhaps just in a mail folder) where you record every change you make to your website that may affect your results. Here’s a very basic example:

Using that, in 6 months time when you’re looking at your web analytics tool & you see that your overall sales conversion jumped 2% on the 11th of March, you can refer to that log & see “ahh, we made the ‘buy now’ button larger”.

The 5 Main Advantages Of A Web Change Log

1. Saves you time & effort in solving problems
2. Can solve disagreements with clients over when/what/how/why changes were made to a site
3. Helps to stop you from making the same mistake twice (not sure whether you’ve tried something before? just search back through the log)
4. Going back periodically & checking the results of your changes helps you to learn what works & what doesn’t, what has the biggest effect, etc.
5. When you set up your next website, a quick look back through your website change log will offer a whole range of ideas & best practices for you to reuse

A Few Suggestions For Further Improvement

1. Add extra performance-tracking columns to your log, for example “purpose” & “result” to keep a history of why you made changes & whether they paid off
2. If you work in a larger organisation you could add ‘cost centre’ & ‘time taken’ fields to this, to track where your resources are spent
3. Set up similar logs to track the effects of your link-building, adwords, email & other off-site campaigns

The single biggest difference between web design & graphic design is so simple, yet so often overlooked. It matters because:

1. Nobody will tell you when you’ve got the two mixed up
2. If your site doesn’t make the jump from good ‘graphic design’ to good ‘web design’, it’s far harder to succeed online.

Here’s the difference:

Graphic Design: The products of Graphic Design are looked at & read.
Web Design: The products of Web Design are looked at, read, and used.

It’s important to focus on the visual aesthetic of your site. Essentially, this aesthetic (the ‘look’) is a tool you’re using to project a certain image. But, if your site is confusing or tough to use, the image you worked so carefully to project starts to crumble and you’ve wasted the hard effort you put into achieving ‘the right look’.

The word ‘usability’ sounds quite scientific & technical. You might see it alongside words like ‘laboratory’, ‘test procedures’ and ‘validation requirements’. But it’s not really complex at all. Usability is a very simple concept: Things should be easy to use.

With that in mind, here are 5 questions you can ask yourself to make sure new visitors perceive your website as easy to use.

1. What is this site about?
2. Why would I want to stay here?
3. Whereabouts am I in the site?
4. Where else can I go from here?
5. How can I find what I’m looking for?

A new visitor to your site should be able to answer those questions no matter what page they land on.

When designing (or redesigning) a homepage, there are many traps to fall into - from concentrating entirely on the ‘look’ of the page, to simply repeating the mistakes of your previous attempt.

A successful homepage is one that gives you the best possible chance of achieiving your objectives. This article offers a checklist of six tasks that every successful homepage should perform.

1. Help Key Visitor Segments Get To The Content They Want

Whether you’re pitching at a single audience, or several distinct groups, it’s important to make sure each of your visitors has an entry point to the content they’re looking for. For example, a small record label might be targetting music buyers, potential artists, distributors & ad agencies. Make sure visitors from each of those segments can reach the content most applicable to them via the homepage. A great example of this is ICI, whose homepage clearly targets Journalists, Analysts, different Investor groups, as well as general browsers & offers each a clear entry into the path most applicable to them.

2. Act As An Introduction For New Visitors

If a visitor who’s never heard of you or your company dropped onto your homepage, would they be able to figure out the answer to the question “What do you do?” There are occasions when it doesn’t matter whether visitors can figure out what you’re about, but those are few and far between. Even if it’s just an ‘About Us’ link, you should offer a simple way for new visitors to figure out what you do.

3. Position Yourself In The Eyes of Both New & Return Visitors

What do you want your customers to think of you? What image do you want to project? Your website is one of the best, easiest places to put on exactly the face you want in front of customers/potential customers. For the same reasons you’d want your ideal photograph to appear next to your name in a newspaper, you should aim to make the best impression possible via your homepage.

4. Guide Visitors Toward The Content You Want Them To Visit

As well as guiding your visitors to the content they want to see, it’s important for you to guide visitors toward the content you want them to visit. This doesn’t mean fill your homepage self-indulgent nonsense, but rather: If there are a few golden items that you could show to your visitors, and showing those to your visitors would significantly benefit you or your organisation, make sure that those are easily reachable either on or from the homepage.

5. Give Customers A Reason To Visit, Revisit & Recommend Your Site

The objective of a website is usually to ’sell’ something, this could be services, products, opinions, events, advertising, ideas, or people, & it may or may not involve any financial transaction. Whatever you are selling, it is beneficial to gain as many chances as possible to do that. The easiest way to do that is to provide reasons for people to visit, revisit and recommend your site to others. There are many ways to do this, for example you may seek to become a resource on your chosen topic, you may offer tools that your target audience would use over and over again, or you may simply offer highly relevant, frequently updated content. However you choose to do this, your homepage is the page you can guarantee people will look at & is the best place to advertise this ‘killer’ content.

6. Get Permission To Speak To Your Visitors Again

Whether it’s on their terms via something like RSS, or on your terms via email/telephone or post, asking your visitors for permission to speak to them again puts you much closer to achieving your objectives than just relying on them to return of their own accord. If you do choose to go the email/telephone/postal route, ensure that you make it as simple as possible for visitors to provide their details, and reassure them that you will not abuse their details.

1. Be Prominent

Many websites make the mistake of giving equal weighting to their ‘buy now’ or ’sign up’ buttons. Some even hide them, thinking this looks better aesthetically. The truth is, making your conversion buttons subtle does look better aesthetically, because having a ’stand out’ button puts the focal point of the page in an odd place. But that’s exactly what you want: the point you want your visitor to reach should draw their eye immediately, and plainly remain the centre of attention. Make your conversion point the brightest, most contrasted element on the page.

2. Keep It Simple

Don’t make your visitors’ eyes dart all over the page. If you’re presenting a choice of options, keep them in one column. If you’re presenting a single product, ensure its details are in logical order.

3. Play With Choices

If your landing page offers visitors 10 different options, try presenting one of those as the ‘logical click’. For example, making the top item double size, or adding a ‘Recommended Item’ splat to it. This works especially well for items where visitors may not know enough to make a logical choice. Try varying the number of options on your landing page. Presenting visitors with the choice of 1000 scarves can often result in the ‘wood for the trees’ phenomenon, and have them quickly exiting via the back button.

4. Include Higher Priced Items

Including a higher priced item on a landing page to contrast with your primary product can work as an ‘anchor point’ for your visitor. Is $200 cheap for a juicer? I have no idea, but if it’s sat next to a $600 juicer then it looks like a bargain to me. Some visitors like to buy based on emotion, some like the satisfaction of making a logical choice. Finding ‘a bargain’ satisfies both of those audiences equally.

5. Provide Enough Information

Think about what information your target audience would need in order to buy your product. What reservations might they have? Answer them.

6. Remove Confusion

If you have an offer, spell it out simply. Read through your copy and, if something is ambiguous, clear it up. This is very important online, as visitors are much less likely to ask clarifying questions than they are in a store. In a store I can ask an assistant something and get an instant answer. On the web, your visitors are more likely just to go to your competition in the hopes they can explain what you haven’t.

7. Provide For Both The Skimmers And The Combers

There are two core audiences on the web: Those who will skim-read your copy, picking out the elements they want & those who will go through combing your copy word-for-word. Using bold headings and pulling important information into summary bullet points satisfies both audiences equally without risking lost sales from either.

8. An Image Can Answer 1000 Questions

The web is an incredibly visual medium and, apart from looking nice, images can often answer the visitor questions you’d never have thought of. This applies whether you’re selling electronic goods, clothing, food, or practically any other item you’d care to stock. Images tell a story. If your visitor is planning to buy a pair of jeans online, she’ll conjure up a mental image of how she’ll look in those jeans. The more easily she’s able to paint that mental picture, the more likely she is to buy.