Your homepage sets the tone for the rest of your content and brand. The outlook itself already speaks volumes on what to expect and gain from your site. By all means, you’ll always want to have your homepage right for crucial mileage in the digital space. Whether it’s your first time having a blog homepage designed or you’re experienced in the scene, it’s important to know quality in design is timeless and more rewarding when rightfully executed.
The following are some important elements to consider in blog homepage designing:
1. Call to Action Above the Folds
Technically, your call to action does not need to feature above the fold but in most scenarios, it’s usually the best idea. As much as you’re getting heavy traffic to your page, it won’t always translate to immediate conversions but is however important to always be ready for those who are immediate conversions.
Purchasing services or goods is always a split-second decision that if delayed could lead to a change of mind or consideration of other brands. So the moment a ready visitor finds a ready call to action feature, it serves them convenience and closure in the information that has resonated as a valuable and essential service.
2. Use Original and High-Quality Images
Images are a form of symbolism and a way of passing a message across. As we know human are visual creatures and so whichever pictorial composition they meet on your blog page will be crucial in communicating brand value and creating appeal. Any picture can be used to communicate despite its quality.
A high-quality picture indicates that time was put in crafting the blog. Clear and precise attention to detail means services are thorough and every ounce of information matters. Your competitors are probably placing cheesy photos and clipart to clutter their pages but a high-quality image will set you apart as a respectable and authoritative brand of standard.
3. Apply Contrasting Colors
Colors are very important in blog page designing. Warm colors are the most sort after as they bring a welcoming and generous feel to pages. The contrast, on the other hand, helps highlight important features such as forms or call to action buttons. This provides a sense of hierarchy and allows your visitors to know where to focus their attention to. Applying the right color will not only make it beautiful or appealing but make it distinguishable from other blog pages that resemble corporate boardrooms.
4. Test your Design on Mobile Devices
We’re living in an era where everything tethers around the internet. At this particular stage, you need to keep in mind that your websites and blog pages need to be optimized for mobile phones. People who don’t have access to desktop computers or laptops will most definitely browse the internet using their mobile devices. Having your blog page optimized for mobile devices is one thing but making it look great on every device is another.
With most web traffic coming from these devices, it’s best to constantly test your site and ensure it has that perfect layout on different screens that will improve user experience and still serve its purpose rightfully.
5. Go Straight to the Point on What you Offer
As much as visitors need to enjoy clipart and graphics on your header, it’s much more crucial to pass across what your offer straight away. And not to bombard them with information, but instead going straight to the point in terms of the texts and cohesive visuals on what services or products you offer. In the same case, your content should put your visitors in a position to distinguish you from those you work in partnership with or competitors.
6. Feature Short Videos
Videos are one if not the most engaging media formats. This powerful addition to your homepage gives a snippet of what you’re all about in a nutshell. Some people may prefer voice descriptions over texts in terms of product or service walkthroughs. Wordy descriptions or explanations may seem tedious and to some, it’s an easy way to lose interest. So incorporate short vibrant videos or animations that will keep your visitors excited and eager to further engage with you.
7. Create a Sense of Emotion with Colors
It’s psychologically proven that 75% of people’s decisions are made out of emotions. Colors have emotional appeals when correctly used or paired. The colors you choose for your homepage should match and resonate with your branding. This as well should evoke the emotions you prefer associated with your brand.
When having your blog home page designed, you could use a color emotion guide that could lead you in picking the right color combinations. Some of the colors used and what they stand for are as follows:
- Grey – balance and calmness
- Green – peace, health, and growth
- Blue – trustworthy, dependability and strength
- Yellow – optimism, warmth and clarity
- Orange – cheerful, confidence and friendly
- Red – youthfulness, boldness, and excitement
- Purple – creativity, wisdom and imaginative
8. Provide Social Proof
Social proof is one way of gaining trust from cold calls or visitors on your blog page. Testimonials act as a reference point for others seeking the legitimacy or effectiveness of your services. Testimonials and feedback as well as help in pointing out key areas that need improvement or just simply for congratulatory purposes.
Trust seals and “featured in” logos are important for social proof of your existence and relevance in the digital space. The more seals or features you get the more commendable and reliable your work is. This in return cements your name as a legit and trustworthy brand.
9. Incorporate Directional Cues
Directional cues help the audience stay focused on certain important aspects of your blog. It could be an arrow or an image of a person pointing or looking at a particular object that helps redirect your audience through a process of understanding your services step by step. This naturally helps your visitors go with the flow as you sensitize them on the relation or importance of different aspects of your blog.
10. Ditch overdoing Carousels and Sliders
Long ago sliding headers were the in thing and any webpage with them was considered up to date and highly relevant. Looking at it a decade later you’ll notice that some designs are now outdated and overused. The effect it carried a while ago brought excitement and a sense of innovation but right now a poorly crafted slider is something you’ll want to dismiss and close as soon as it appears on your page. Sliders bombard the user with the information they never asked for and provide a poor user experience.
A visitor on your page deserves to know that you care about them and rather not about the information you want them to pass across. It comes off as selfish and self-centered. Instead, engage in effective modern-day slider designs and tether your content around the action you want your audience to take.
11. Provide Real Product or Service Photo
Instead of propping mockups, it’s advisable to use real product or service photos. Every person will be more interested in viewing what they are getting themselves into or purchasing before they make the important decision of engaging. This helps your audience envision themselves using the product and somewhat gives them a temporary promise and a sense of ownership of the product. If it’s a service, show your people in properly branded in company or organization gear that will speak volumes on your mission and vision of providing the service.
Useful Read: How to Sell Products on Blog?
12. Use White Spaces
If you take a keen look, most modern pages are rather much simpler and less sophisticated than some from way back. Less clutter on a page helps bring out only the important information and make it stand out. Web designers have started embracing white spaces as a way of focusing attention and creating friendly designs. White spaces to the eye are soothing, comfortable, and interesting to look at.
13. Emphasize on Topography
The types of fonts used in blog pages speak volumes on the character and tone of the blog site owner or service provider. In the past, there were less unique fonts that could be used to make a site beautiful and appealing but now there’re loads to choose from and just like colors, they elicit emotions. However, if you’re on a budget and don’t quite want to spend much, you could resort to Google fonts for great and free options.
14. Reduce the Amount of Copy
Blog pages with a lot of text or blocks of information are mostly perceived as uninviting and cluttered. It’s guaranteed that no one scrolling through a whole load of literature trying to seek services will reach the end of the page. Researchers have found out that 65% of blog pages with 95% of its content as wordings often at times have high bounce rates and little to no conversions.
Keep your paragraphs limited to two or three sentences at most with short, clear, and well-crafted sentences. Instead of outpouring all your information on the blog page, tease your content to encourage your visitors to explore further your other pages and click through.
15. Incorporate Search Functions
Search functions are very important in webpages to help visitors go straight to what they are looking for. If you create a lot of content on different niches or fundamentals in life, then a search bar will come in handy to help ease zeroing in on information. It’s not that much a must-have, but it’s a necessity in getting insight on what most of your audiences are looking for or want when the land to your page.
16. Optimize the Load Time
This is all about providing that design aspect that can be seen in the background. An example of such a design is how your pages load. Making your blog home page load faster doesn’t affect the appearance but will instead make your visitors enjoy the design and experience. An addition to it is that it’s also great for search engine optimization.
17. Maintain Structure and Balance
When designing your homepage, make sure there is symmetry in terms of the content and features you’re incorporating. Overdoing one aspect leads to bad user experience and low ratings on usability. Humans, being the visual creatures they are, seek balance in everything that arouses interest in them optically. The sense of balance provides a clear structure to base your decisions or reasoning from. A poorly structured or balanced homepage gives an awkward appearance that devalues your brand.
18. Include Blog Highlights
Blog highlights on your homepage are important in engaging your visitors. An effective way of executing this is by adding sections with thumbnails from your recent posts to promote your blogs. As well, this helps your visitors have an assortment of different information to ponder on and enjoy. These highlights give brief snippets on what to expect in a blog or the topic in discussion. In this case, thought evoking and neatly crafted highlights are highly important for audience retaining.
19. Update Often
After a while, it’s obvious that your homepage will get stale and too familiar no matter how great your content is. Constant improvements and tweaks on your page will help create that sense of relevance with something new to look forward to. Keeping your homepage fresh and vibrant with always portray an active presence in the digital space.
Updates don’t necessarily mean in content alone but in terms of incorporating the latest layouts and symbolisms. New pictures, videos, templates, or animation could go a long way in keeping your visitors hooked and always coming back for more.
20. Benefits of Well-Designed Home Pages
Your preferred homepage design is equivalent to your front yard at home. It’s simply a projection of the kind of person you are or the principles or standards your brand stands for. People are first hooked by sight before literature or anything else.
The ultimate homepage is one that:
- Interests your audience
- Captivates your audience
- Guides your audience
- Sensitizes your audience
- Brings them to a distinct and well sited to action
There’s a lot of ways of benefiting from a well-designed home page but it all depends on how you layer it. Complexities and sophistication could be an idea for class and standards but that could cause a cluttered mess that your audiences won’t want to spend time pruning information from.
In blog pages, simplicity is essential. Always ensure to start with the basics. When carving out your perfect blog page, make sure every element of it well satisfies a need or dismisses a concern. For you to comprehend this, first put yourself in your audience’s shoes. What kind of content formats do you like? Of course, this is preferential but there’s always a standard and acceptable format that resonates with everyone.
Some of the questions to build on are:
(A) What Does Your Audience Expect?
This is very key to a blog homepage design. Your audience expects nothing more but quality and valuable information. The only proven way of maintaining an audience and increasing traffic to your page is by value proposition. Offer credible and reputable information that can be used as a source of reference and at the same time be engaging.
(B) What do you Need on your Homepage?
Just like earlier on mentioned, a homepage is like your front yard. Do fountains look appealing in your yard? Do exotic marbles capture your visitors’ eyes? The same thing is applied in this context. Always have the necessities and don’t overdo them. You can have warm and welcoming pictures, gifs, short videos, or templates.
(C) Which Element Takes Priority?
This is molded on how you format your blog page. That is, which information, template or visual aspect appears and at which part of the page. Is it a pictorial representation to emphasize something you’ve talked about? How you prioritize information or elements on your content will determine whether your audience will scroll further deeper into your page.
When you answer the above and are fully convinced you to have the right answers to them, only then will you have the perfect homepage design. So the following are the benefits of a well-designed blog homepage:
Benefits of Well-Designed Blog Homepage
1. More Conversions
A well-designed homepage is one that convinces the visitor that you are worth their time and resources. If you provide the necessary opportunity and incentive you will be able to convert your page visitors. You could be on an email building expedition or lead generation scheme and for such, you’ll require to place an email sign up form. By making such options readily and openly available on your webpage, you will quicken your conversion time as well as uptick traffic.
A classic and most crucial way of boosting converting is by creating a strong first impression on your page. The first few things a visitor sees on your page for the first few seconds after entry will determine whether they’ll linger around or close tabs and find another to engage. If your visitor enjoys their stay and first-time experience you can be sure that they will be frequent visitors and could as well recommend to their networks. It would not be an immediate conversion but having a distinct hook on them means they always come back sooner or later.
2. Improve Awareness
Making your brand or company memorable is very important in the digital space. This is made possible by allowing your messaging and brand image to be on every page. It shows an authoritative personality that believes in what they stand for or advocate. A firm and reputable brand provides dependability and a sense of distinct intellect.
With your homepage as the gateway to the rest of the website, you have to put every necessity in correct order and format; your tagline, purpose of the brand, and logo need to take the Centre stage. All this can be capped with captivating short statements that will interest your visitors. This statement could be a mantra or belief that you uphold.
When using symbolism as a way of visitor enchantment, consider applying the correct formats and colors. These symbols and wording should show your problem-solving skills and what kind of problems as well. Your problem-solving services or information should cater to the visitor’s needs, be it personal or professional. With that in place, a visitor won’t have to waste time trying to figure out what services you’re offering but will immediately get an impression of what you offer.
3. Improves Search Ranking
Search ranking is very important in helping a brand maintain relevance. An out of date or poorly crafted website will never feature among top search engines. This only throws your name further down the pecking order where you’ll receive little to no visitors. So have a well-designed and professional blog homepage so as to feature among the top in the search engine rankings.
4. Reduces Bounce Rates
Bounce rates are high in poorly crafted pages with shallow content. A professional website not only attracts major traffic but retains and later on converts. A well-crafted website is one that ushers a visitor, walks them through, and helps them in exploring your page.
Well-positioned content acts like a bot that attends to visitors physiologically and visually, attending to their concerns and dismissing them in a swift flow. With such superb user experience, you are sure to retain traffic and your numbers can only get better.
5. It’s Simpler to Add Future Webpage Functions
A proper blog page is on that is adjustable and flexible. We live in a fast-paced technological era and frequent changes and adaptations are a must for success. You can consult from web designers that provide blog plugins and demo trials for practice or sampling. Pick and settle on a blog page that can be readjusted to add different new functionalities for efficiency and edge in the business.
Also Read: Quick Tips To Attract More Visitors For Blog Post
6. Help Keep up With Rivals
In the digital space, it’s always about outdoing your peers and having an edge. Every blogger or website owner strives to have the best in blog homepage designs. Acquiring the latest and best technology or designs creates popularity in digital entrepreneurship in which translates to relevance in the market and more traffic.
To better keep up with the digital market you have to be flexible and have an open mind. Customizing your blog homepage designs is not just the only option to stay on top but the real work is in remaining relevant and reflecting value through it all.