Don’t Bore Your Visitors: How to Evaluate Your Website’s Homepage in 30 Seconds or Less

Is your homepage badly in need of an update? Fire up your browser and head on over to your website. Here's five crucial questions to ask yourself (and friends) about your homepage to see if it's really working for you as hard as it could be.

1. Does it grab visitors' attention in 8 seconds or less? Bored visitors probably won't stick around, and your competitors are just a Google search away!
2. Does it stimulate interest and reinforce reader's confidence that they're in the right place? What's worse than a boring website? An irrelevant one! If you sell widgets, make sure your homepage not only states clearly that you make widgets but why your widgets are better that your competitors. (Or why your services are better than your competitors')
3. Does it inspire the desire to take the action or clicking deeper towards a purchase? If you were your potential customer, would you be persuaded to do business with you based on your homepage content?
4. Is how they take action easy and obvious? Step 6 feet away from your monitor and look at the screen. Is it obvious where you want your visitors to click next? If not, you need a more obvious "call to action".
5. After they've clicked, does the next page give them satisfaction by providing exactly what they wanted how they wanted? Did you hammer home why your services or products are better than your competitors? Did you provide testimonials, assurances or guarantees to make doing business with you as risk free and comfortable as possible?

And there you have it! Critical website analysis in 30 seconds or less! I'd encourage you though to spend at least a few minutes on this task. Most of your website visitors probably enter your website through your homepage. Spending a little extra time to make sure it's doing its job of impressing your visitors can go a long way to getting more business from your website.

Is Your Website Content Up to Date?

Why wait till Spring before cleaning up your website? With a new year upon us, now is the perfect time to review your website and make sure all the information is up to date and that your content reflects any changes you may have made to your business in 2011.

Also, for Website On-Denand Clients, what better way to use up your 30 to 60 minutes of free website updating time for January that your Website On-Demand plan now comes with!