A good home page allows your visitors to find what they’re looking for fast, without having to send out for the search party

We all want to help our web visitors achieve their goals, right? So let’s reclaim the home page for our visitors.

As soon as visitors arrive on your website, it needs to be clear within seconds that they’ve come to the right place. They need to feel confident that you can help them:

• solve their problem,
• answer their question, or 
• complete the task they’ve set out to accomplish.

If you’re like me, you land on a website and do a lightning-quick scan of the home page while your mouse lays in wait, just itching to pounce on the “Back” button if you don’t see what you’re looking for straight off the bat.

Give them what they want
The plain truth is that people are impatient on the web. Visitors are in a hurry to get the information they want and move on. Since there are millions of alternative websites in cyberspace, they will quickly go to another one if they don't immediately see that you can help them.

If you really truly want to help your visitor above all else, you must first understand what they want. At this stage, many people just give up: “We have so many different groups of users looking for all kinds of different products and services that we can’t possibly write the home page for all our visitors.”

Hey, nobody said it was easy, but it is possible. Look at www.dell.ca. It’s a great example of a site that is written and designed for its visitors. Instead of focusing on how great they are as a company, a good deal of their home page is devoted to an area where the visitor can self-select based on whether they are looking for a home computer, some software for work, or much more. Essentially, the Dell home page says, “Yes, you’ve come to the right place. Yes, we can help you. Please tell us who you are so we can help you find exactly what you need.”

You’re in the right spot. We can help
Try a few of these tips to help your visitors understand they’ve come to the right place:

• Ensure your website has a distinct, easily recognizable purpose.
• Keep the focus on your visitors and their needs.
• Be sure that you know the specific reasons people are visiting your site. What tasks do they want to accomplish? Make it immediately clear that they can easily accomplish their tasks on your site.
• Show them their pain, and give them your solution.
• Speak in their language. Use the words your visitors are using as search terms when they arrive at your site via the search engines. Strip out corporate lingo and industry jargon.
• Ensure your links are as clear and unambiguous as possible.
• Recognize that websites can be hard to navigate. Make sure your text is clear and helps direct your visitors forward to the information they are looking for.

To wrap things up, if Dell can make it easy for its visitors, so can the rest of us. To help your visitors achieve their goals, spend some significant time figuring out what they need, and then give it to them in their own language.

Emily Amos is a Halifax copywriter specializing in writing for the web. She helps companies convert more people into clients by writing key marketing messages that resonate. Check out some of her work at www.wordsavvy.ca.