How to Design the Best Homepage

Homepage is the page where a visitor lands on being redirected to a website. In physical analogy a Homepage may be termed as the entrance to a website and it must be grand and glorious to welcome and comfort the visitors. There are certain essentials that a Homepage must have in order grab the attention of the visitor, to generate interest, to sustain the interest and to motivate the action that the website is designed to achieve. A number of graphical, presentational and technical aspects need to be emphasized on while designing a meaningful and attractive Homepage. Some of the measures are summarized as follows:

• Homepage must be distinct and appealing. Masthead, tagline and major content category links must be laid out on the page in a very organized manner so as to clearly convey the quality and purpose of the website.

• The prose text should be limited. Lengthy content on the very first page where the visitors are giving just a cursory reading may offset them and they may bounce to other website.

• Presenting all the major options on the Homepage is the one of the smartest ways of welcoming your visitors.

• Homepage must be designed in a way that it is accessible from all the pages on the website. Many a times, users turn back to the Homepage to begin fresh task and this practice will be very handy.

• Multimedia presentation instills life into an otherwise inanimate text. Content on Homepage must be dynamic and supported with images, music and video but at the same the loading time should remain uncompromised.

• Selection of the right color especially for the backdrop is very important. Too flashy or too dull shades can offset the user. A right balance must be ensured.

• If words convey meaning, their typography imparts more appeal to that meaning. It's just like communicating through words rendered in more palatable manner. So, this aspect should be emphasized too.

Designing Homepage is an art; and creativity is not subject to hard and fast rules. However, the abovementioned tips are standard parameters and have proved beneficial over the period of time. These are tried and tested tricks of the trade and should be kept in mind for designing a Homepage that is attractive, meaningful and renders desired results.