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Top 5 Home Page Mistakes
In our day, when the rush after profit is so big, most of the times we don't observe all the mistakes made over and over again. In this article I identified the top five web mistakes that can reduce a website's effectiveness as well as its long-term growth prospects, and provides useful hints how to avoid them.

  • Not mention what is your domain!
    • The most obvious problem I usually see in a home page is the absence of description exactly what the site deals with. This usually means just saying What You Do. One of the essential factors here is what I call “precision”. How easily someone visiting your site/page for the first time can understand what the deal is, and if they're in the right place.

    First impression is the most critically valuable. If someone has enjoyed it, s/he recommends it to 3 people, but if not, s/he will say 10 people still in. Don't ever bother welcoming anyone to your web site. That goes without saying.

    Whenever we visit a new web page, we always have this question in our mind: “Am I in the right place? For avoiding an unacceptable situation you must use the most basic design techniques. First is a good position, secondly use a visible size of the most important and at last, don't forget about the strong contrast of what they need to know.

Web site's first job is to answer that question, whether positively or negatively.

How to Say What You Do
It is really simple to explain what you deal with. You just mention 3 important moments:
  • What your company/service is
  • What you do
  • For whom


So a good intro might be: “RT Design Studio is a professional and a really great team that creates web designs, and provides its clients with products of the highest quality standards, in the shortest deadlines.”
  • Incredible Graphics
    • We've all been to web sites that rely on a big splash of stock photography or graphics trying to make an incredible first impression, but the effect doesn't quite happen. This is what I mean by “Incredible Graphics”.

    I think that using the graphics correctly, you can catch the eyes and convey your messages in the best way. Don't exaggerate with the text, it has to communicate information very quickly and accurately. Imagery, too, can import a rich combination of “soft” info, or a high-level of complex info in the form of a graph, chart, or diagram.

    The selection of imagery has to be credible. For example, don't use pictures that are not representative for your business, the information given by images have to correspond to reality, or at least to your domain of work.

  • Bad Production
    • I have to say that shoddy production technique is one of the biggest factors that can impact your home page's success rate. So a home page should have a high content-to-markup ratio, have well-written title and meta-description tags, and feature the most relevant content high up in the source.

    Use of inline styling, tables for layout, lack of separation of style and code from markup, and heavy non-semantic HTML can all be detrimental to the probability that a visitor will proceed further into the site.
    A poorly-produced page will also:
  • be slower to load
  • translate less successfully to other media (like mobile devices)
  • be less accessible to people with disabilities such as screen readers or magnifiers
  • be more costly to edit and re-design over time


  • Give them what they want!
    • Remember that a home page should focus on what the visitor is interested in, not what you're interested in.

    When someone visits your site, he is trying to find out if he is going to get what he needs. Of course, all web sites have their own goals, but the best way to achieve those is by helping its visitors achieve theirs. The better you do that, the more people will come back to your site, and recommend your site to others.

    The most successful web sites find win solutions, keeping people on the site by giving them what they want long enough for the site to get what it wants.

  • The Dead Space.
    • “The Dead Space” is what you build for your visitors that have nothing in them!

    Usually it goes like: “Under Construction” or “Coming Soon” placeholder. Whenever you see one of these you think “This site isn't finished, so I'm unlikely to get what I want here!” OK, so it only took a few years for web designers and owners to realize this was dumb and pointless.


No News is Not Necessarily Good News. My favorite modern Dead Pit trap is the Empty News Section variant. If you don't have a lot of News to give, it's far better to show just a few items on your home page than to create a section with not a lot in.
 
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