You must be waiting for a perfect idea, I mean the good one. This may be the idea that you have been waiting for throughout your life to come to you and change your life as a whole.
Well, for that you obviously need a perfect website that can make your idea come to the real life. Not simply any website but a good one that will rapidly and wonderfully illustrate the concepts and will give the reason that why the world needs to embrace it.
You may pop over to the Template Monster or Theme Forest or any other website that provide plenty of Word Press themes. Well, somehow you may have lost hours of your day while combing the themes and noting your favourite options. But yes this is all worth it.
You might have found the amazing a WordPress theme which is multipurpose to bring your new idea to life. This can be a theme that comes with so many good colors. It has got
- Built-in page builders
- Shortcodes aplenty
- Unlimited choice of fonts and colors
- Different types of seven sliders
- Portfolios
- Shopping carts
- Pop Up Boxes
- Landing Pages
- Forums
Well, now you are about to get a great treat. You and your new theme can do wonders together.
How could you not? When it comes to so many options and the demo appears just perfect. Well, unfortunately, this is not going to be successful at any cost as you may think about it. Now if you seek a reason for this, simply because you are going backwards. You are actually jumping a way ahead in the entire process.
Jumping ahead? Now you must think that I am wrong. And you need to have a theme to start working with. Well No!
A WordPress theme is not the starting point anytime. A theme is basically a means by which you can simply get to the final point.
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First Impressions are Somewhat Critical
In most of the website visits, your home page is what makes the first impression. It begins to tell about your story and offer you to connect with the visitors. You just need to make sure that your home page is actually welcoming, build up the trust, looks professional, answer the queries and offer clear direction or not.
So, what’s the problem? Of course you cannot jump to the design without thinking through your story first, the ability you need to build the trust, answers you need to give and the way in which you need to direct the user.
Designing and defining your home page is the vital thing you can do when it comes to website development. You need not rush ahead or jump in a hurry for its execution. Executing it without proper planning will come up with negative results for sure. It may fail to produce what you actually want and it will then create a negative first impression that cannot eradicate obviously.
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Begin with a Plan and Answer the Key Questions
Begin with a clean slate, a clear process and a perfect strategy. Do not get into picking the pretty theme with 100+ options. Design a proper marketing plan, a strategy and have its fair implementation.
First of all, think how success looks like for your future website? What are your objectives and goals? What do you expect from your website to produce for you? And then some common examples of a successful visit include:
- Subscribers
- Leads
- Warm Prospects
- Actual Sales
- Brand Exposure
To assist you in formulating a plan, you need to know the answers to some very critical questions that may help in defining your target market, how you can assist, and they can simply convert. Ask yourself these simple questions and document your answers well. I am asking you to write these down so that you can review them and validate your actions to all of them.
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Think about your Target Market
- What are the issues or the problems you need to solve?
- Which service, product or content can offer a solution?
- Can you offer the social proof?
- Which content can be offered as additional information?
- How your visitors can convert into the subscriber, sale or lead?
Once you have clear answers to these above questions, you will be capable to offer some strategy to your process. You will be able to plan things ahead and ensure that your process is in line with the goals and objectives.
So here comes some more guidance for you.
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Describe the website Personas and Craft a Roadmap for each:
Now we need to work further on it and dig the information accordingly. Our next step would be to clearly recognize the document that comes to your website. If you can keep these visitors into the segments, we’ll be easily able to better the market to them. And these groupings are well known as website personas.
Defining personas assist you to stay concerned and focused on the visitor. The process lets you ensure that you working for your visitor in the actual sense which will obviously lead them to convert into the desired action.
Now when you have visitors defined well into the segments, we feel the need to create a roadmap for each. You may think that this is common sense, but it is not. I have a word with lots of people who have defined groups, but just forget to design content for every group.
You can bring in the methods in use that you find suitable for you. No matter which method you bring in use, until the time you take a moment to document the route you would prefer each person to be taken within the website.
This is one of the steps that help in defining what do you need to offer within your website to service different visitors and their exclusive needs. When website visitors have serviced adequately, they are happy of course. And happy visitors convert and return too.
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Make your Navigation Easier
Make it a point that you make your website’s navigation easier. Do you remember any time when you stepped into the departmental store and felt totally lost? This is how website visitors feel when they visit some website having poor navigation.
So you need to transfer this ease to your website. Your website users or the visitors need some guidance and direction. And if you feel that you are satisfied in the persona-based, there may be persona options as well. And before digging into the homepage design, you need to have a navigation menu defined for the top-level items at least.
Before getting into the homepage design, you need to have a navigation menu which may be defined as the top level of items. Just make sure that this navigation apparently lead the visitors to the core pages of products, about, contact and services. You just make use of some common language and avoid being cute verbiage.
If you have got some extra amount of navigation items then you need to consider some secondary menu for that. We have got one at the top right of the header and it offers key hyperlinks for the store theme buyers. Adding some links has saved a few hours in an email answering questions about the sign in and account access.
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Focused Call to Actions
Call to actions is one of the primary things that I feel like discussing with any of the new consumer or the prospect. When I do this I simply question the person what leads to successful website visit. I question what are the steps that visitors would like to take before the leaving the website.
These Call to Actions may Include:
- Signing up for a newsletter
- Liking a Facebook page
- Posting a comment on the blog post
- Calling into the mortar and brick store or the company
- Asking for more information through a contact form
- Heading for purchase
- Seeing the product demo
They can be actually anything. The key point to keep in mind is to define these earlier in your plans and the processes and later on having these centre and front when you finally enter into the design. You should design to involve these items and can match well with the rest of the elements so that they feel natural and look professional.
Because you document the desired call to actions, you should actually revisit your original goals and the objectives and validate if they are in sync or not. I know I reflect on this type, but you would be surprised
At seeing that a lot of people get caught in the design and totally forget about the real objectives and goals, you will be really surprised.
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An overview of who you are and what you do
Homepage should have some text. Obviously not a lot of text, but enough content to give your visitors a brief overview of what you do and who you are! Keep this information precise and succinct while keeping it informative. At this step, your objective should be to keep the content clear to your audience while making it comfortable for people to navigate other areas of the website.
Users obviously do not want to read the paragraphs and the paragraphs of text on the home page. They really want confirmation that has placed a possible match to their need and they need direction on how to learn more about things that actually matter to them.
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Promote your Content
This is one of the magical parts of the website. It happens when the actual content goes into the website and the idea becomes a mere reality.
When you promote your content, just remember to keep the key theory of simplicity at its place, As people scan the home pages make sure that your content is legible and easy to understand.
And once you are done promoting your content, take a step back and question yourself how you did it. And here are a few questions that you can actually use to validate your work.
So if you have got satisfactory answers to every contradicting statement. Congratulations and get ready to launch this masterpiece. And if you feel your answers No then go back and pay attention to the items that you have missed. The extra time you will put in now, will come ten times back to the happy website visitors.