Creating a Successful Landing Page In EverWeb!

Creating a successful landing page is possibly one of the most important things you’ll need to think about when you create your EverWeb made website. A landing page, also known as the Home page, is usually the first page that your visitor will access, or ‘land’ on when coming to your site. Once a visitor lands on your Home page, you’ll want to keep them there and have them explore your site with the potential of purchasing your goods and/or services, or discovering the information that your site contains.

In this post, we’ll refer to any organization as a ‘business’ whether you sell goods or services, have an informational site, or just a hobby site. The recommendations below, for creating a successful landing page, will apply to any site’s Home page.

The first page a visitor to your site sees when accessing your site will be the one where you will want to quickly and visibly display a few important things:

1. The Home Page should describe concisely, and accurately, what the business is and does
2. The Home Page should be designed with its target audience in mind
3. The Home Page should define what problem(s) the business can solve
4. The Home Page should lead the visitor to act in some way: What should, or can, the visitor do next from the Home page?

To fulfil these functions and requirements, you’ll need to design your Home page to meet these goals.

Before You Start
Before you begin to design your Home page, remember that it’s important to make your page mobile friendly. Google, Bing and other search engines will put priority on sites that put mobile first and desktop design second. To get the best of both worlds we recommend that you design using a Responsive style page rather than a fixed width style page. Responsive pages adapt to the device they are displayed upon automatically. This will save you time and effort in the future, even if initially it takes you more time in the design process.

Designing your Home page to be mobile friendly will also benefit you when it comes to Search Engine Optimization. When you design your page, remember to fill out the appropriate fields in the Page Settings tab so that you can improve your Home Page’s ranking. Check out EverWeb’s SEO for EverWeb Video course, or check out the chapter on SEO in the EverWeb User Manual for more information.

Home Page Design Elements
Your Home page needs to be authentic and trustworthy so that it instils confidence in your visitors when they interact withy je page. As such include the following design elements in to your Home page:

1. Business Name
2. Business Logo
3. Business Legal Information, e.g. Chamber of Commerce code, VAT or Tax ID etc,
4. Business Contact Information
5. Client List (Remember to ask their permission first)
6. Awards or certifications that you may have received
7. Client Testimonials
8. Customer Rating of Business (e.g. from sources such as TrustPilot)
9. Whilst it’s difficult to stop people from plagiarising text in your site, your site should use the copyright symbol followed by the current year to deter people from doing so.

Using a Master Page to Save Time and Effort
We strongly recommend using a Master Page in your site. It’s a great way to save you time and effort. On the Master page you place elements that you want to see on every page of your site. This will include elements such as social media icons and the color scheme that you want to use on all of the pages of your site, as well as other page settings that you wish to use globally.

The beauty of a Master page is that you only need to apply these elements and settings once, then attach the Master page to your regular pages for the template to be integrated. If at a later date you change, for example, your company logo, you’ll only need to change the Master page for the change to take effect on all the regular pages that use the Master Page.

Some of the elements described above should be included in a Master Page so that they can be applied to all of the pages in your site, e.g. your company name and logo typically will be in the header of your Master Page. Legal credentials and business contact details will typically appear in the footer of your Master page.

Design Tips for a Better Hone Page
When designing your Home page, keep things simple and clear:

1. You’ll want to have one, at maximum two, headline messages on your page, no more. Keep the language you use simple, clear and concise. Sometimes, a hero image will also do this job for you, rather than text, so consider what’s best for your business here.
2. Use only two font types if you can. One font style for headlines and one for text. For example you could use a Sans Serif font for Headlines and a Serif font for body text. Your page text should be large enough to see. Some of your visits may be vision impaired, so very small text should be avoided. The exception to this if for text that you don’t want to draw attention to, e.g. legal text, where you would use a smaller font.
3. Keep you page’s colors simple and harmonious. Color should be used to provide emphasis, drawing your visitor to parts of the page you want them to notice. Remember also that color choice should consider those who are color impaired e.g. mixing greens and reds may cause some people problems.
4. Add a Call-To-Action. Use a Call-To-Action (CTA) to help guide the visitor as to what to do next, e.g. a CTA could lead to a newsletter sign up form, book a call, make a purchase, or lead to a ‘more information’ page on your site.
5. Remember that your Home page is the map for your site. It’s the page from which your visitor can discover your site, so make navigation easy and simple. Use EverWeb’s Navigation Bar widget to create a menu. This can be a standard menu or a hamburger menu. Ideal for mobile use!
6. Include testimonials and ratings on your Home page. This is a great page to advertise how good your business is. If you have great reviews and scores, them put this prominently on your page!
7. Always remember your audience: When you build your Home page, keep your target audience in mind and design your site accordingly! This can be expressed through the language you use, the visuals you use and the color choice and font styles you employ.

Keeping Your Home Page Up To Date
After you have designed your Home page, remember to review it regularly. Some websites will need updating frequently due to the nature of their business. Some sites may be relatively static. Whatever the case, make sure that the Home page gets regular updates and refresh. In this way your visitors will know that your site is alive. Sometimes a blog may be something to help your site as you can reference this from your Home page. If your Home page doesn’t require updating regularly, a regular blog that links to the Home page (using EverWeb’s RSS Feed widget) may be just the thing to keep visitors coming back to your site.

there are a lot of great and easy ways in which you can design a great looking Home page, one that’s mobile friendly, uses SEO and is a delight to your visitors, keeping them coming back often for more content!