It’s fairly obvious that every area of your website is extremely important when it comes to impressing your customers (or potential customers). If they don’t like what they see then they aren’t very likely to hang around and explore your website in any depth. It’s not going too far to say that if you don’t get things right from the very beginning, you could lose a lot of business as a result.

While not everyone will arrive on your website via the home page, it’s safe to say that a lot of people will – and even those who don’t are very likely to go there once they have studied the page they arrived on.

So does your home page make just the right impression on people? Does it make them want to stay on your site and explore a bit further? Or does it turn them off completely and send them elsewhere?

A great home page should without doubt be welcoming and enticing. You can of course have add ons such as a web counter to tell people how well visited the site is so far, but you should focus on every single aspect of the home page, from the most important aspect to the least important, in order to make sure you don’t leave anything out.

It should make it clear exactly what the website is about and what visitors can expect to get from it. A clear navigation system is crucial for making sure people can easily get beyond the home page and into other areas of the site which you will no doubt want them to explore. Choose your wording for each section of the menu carefully so as to make it absolutely clear what people will find there. It can be tempting to be clever and choose words which could be perceived as having a double meaning, but if you do this you might confuse people – and the main thing you should be aiming for here is clarity.

Another area to consider on your home page is the balance between images and content. Words are the most important factor on the page since they can be structured to pick up valuable search engine traffic and also evoke emotions and excitement in the reader if they are put together with the aims of the website in mind.

Images can be valuable and they will enhance the home page when used properly, but make sure they don’t overshadow the content, since that is what will keep people on the page and encourage them to explore further.

It can be difficult to arrive at the ideal solution for a home page at the first time of trying. Some elements, such as the main heading of the page, the website counter and the navigation bar, may stay the same but you could end up altering and tweaking everything else for a number of weeks or even months before you finally end up with the exact combination that really brings in the results.