8 Must Do Tips For Designing Your Website’s First Page in EverWeb!

Designing the first page of your website can be an exciting and frustrating time. Using EverWeb to create the pages of your site makes this process incredibly easy, with complex tasks made easy to achieve, so that both novices and experienced website designers benefit.

When it comes to designing your first page, it’s probably going to be the Home page of your site, the page that people see first when accessing your site. It’s also called the Landing, or index page. Here are some tips on how to make the best, first impression when building your site’s first page…

1. Choosing a Responsive or Fixed Width Page Design
   The first thing you’ll need to decide on when building your website is the type of page layout that you’re going to use. Our advice is to use a Fixed width Centered Layout if you’re a beginner or novice user. If you’re more experienced with EverWeb and web page design use a responsive page layout. The good news for beginners and novices is that you can always redevelop your Centered layout design in to a Responsive design later on if you want to. You can find more information about page layouts in our blog post.

   When choosing the page layout template in EverWeb, click in the dropdown in the top left hand corner of the Theme Template Chooser. By default this is set to ‘All’. Now you can filter the type of theme template that you want, so you can either choose Fixed Width (i.e. Centered Layout) or Responsive.

2. Your Home Page Has a Clear Purpose
   When building any page in your site, you should clearly and concisely define what the page is about in the context of your site, for example, is your site a personal one, a portfolio, a business site, hobby site, informational or resource type site and so forth… Secondly, remember to think about what you want visitors to do on each page of your site, for example, contact you, learn something, buy a product etc.
3. Using a Page Header
   Usually your page will contain some form of header where you place information that you always want at the top of your page. For a Centered Layout you can see this area clearly defined at the top of the page. For a Responsive page, however, a header is technically not really needed, Just add a section (e.g. use a responsive row widget) too the top of your page that you want to act as a header.

   We recommend also using a Master page and placing your Header contents in the Master page. As the Master page is a template it should be attached to all of the pages in your site. In this way, the header information that you include in the Master page will appear on all of the pages that you have attached it to. This saves you time and effort when designing your pages, and it also will save time and effort in the future if ever you want to amend the contents of the header. You’ll only need to do it once and the changes will appear on all of the pages that have the Master page attached.

   The header will contain objects that you want to appear on some, if not all, of the pages in your site, for example, your logo, site name, and a navigation menu to link your visitors to other pages in your site. EverWeb includes a built in ‘Navigation Menu’ widget so you can add a consistent menu across pages.

4. Add a Hero Section or Banner to Your Page
   Creating an initial visual impression is a good idea to greet your visitors with. You can do this either with a ‘Hero’ image, or with a strong headline ‘banner’. After presenting your hero image, or banner, follow up by creating a supporting subheading or call-to-action
5. Core Content Area
   Your Home page is usually the page where you ‘layout your internet stall’. You’ll want to create core content on this page that may include such content as a section on who you are and what the site is for, the types of services and/or products you are offering, an image gallery, portfolio, or video showing off your products and services, or some recent customer testimonials.

   EverWeb includes widgets which be used to display images effectively (the Image Slider, Image Gallery and Responsive Image Gallery widgets) as well as Fill Options to help you easily embed images and video in to your page. You can even add images and video as a Browser Background if you want.

6. Create a Call-to-Action
   Adding a Call To Action (CTA) to your Home page will help you guide your visitor to act. Usually, a CTA will take the form of either a Button with a CTA on it e.g. “Buy Now”, “Contact Me”, “Download Here”, etc. “Buy Now”, or via a Form, for example, a newsletter sign up form. You can use EverWeb’s Contact Form Advanced widget to easily create and customize almost any type of form
7. Customize Your Footer
   At the bottom of your page you will find a Footer section. Use this part of the page to include items such as Contact information, social media links, legal and copyright notices. You might also want to include some navigation links to secondary pages that you have not included in your main Navigation Menu.
8. Always Include SEO and Metadata
   This is an important task to complete but often one that gets overlooked. Adding Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to your pages, and especially to your Home page, will improve the visibility of your site’s pages on the Internet. So be sure to complete the Web Page Title, Web Page Description and Keywords fields in the Inspector Window’s Page Settings tab. In addition, you can add H1 and H2 headers to your text, in the Text Inspector tab, and you can add ALT text to your images in the Shape Options tab’s Fill section, or in within some image based widgets, as appropriate. Completing these tasks whilst building your pages will help boost your SEO. For more information on SEO go to the SEO for EverWeb video course.
9. Additional Tips
   Lastly, when building the pages of your site remember to choose a cohesive color scheme and use only 2–3 fonts in your site. You can set up default color palettes and default text styling via EverWeb’s Format-> Default Styles menu option. And don;t forget to use Master pages either! Save yourself time and effort and get a consistent look to your pages using this important feature.

Designing the first page of your website should be fun but also place where you showcase your business or community! You can find out more about EverWeb and all of its features at the EverWeb website! Happy website building!