Web Design Tips

How to Create A Highly Effective Website Home Page

April 5, 2014 Jennifer Bourn

While many visitors may enter your website for the first time through a blog post, your Home page is the virtual front door of your website and the main door into your site for the rest of the world. When someone visits your site directly through your main URL, your Home page is the first page of your website they will see.

The Home page represents the very first opportunity you have to make an impression. So visitors need to be able to quickly figure out — in just a few seconds — if they are in the right place, and if your site is what they have been looking for.

Defining the purpose of your website, and in turn the purpose of your Home page is the first step in creating a strategy that will attract your ideal clients and customers to your website.

4 Keys to Landing Pages that Clinch Conversions Every Time

February 19, 2012 Jennifer Bourn

If you’ve been thinking of your landing page a just a holding area where your website visitors can launch browsing excursions to all the other areas around your website, I’d like to change your way of thinking. You do not want your visitors to leave your landing page to browse your website. Your landing page isn’t just a portal or a launch pad. It’s the first place you’re going to clinch a conversion and win a new customer.

If you haven’t been thinking of your landing page as a place where you land conversions, your strategy may need some revising. Here are five keys to creating a landing page that does what it’s supposed to do – win customers.

4 Things You Must Know When Creating Your Irresistible Free Offer

January 18, 2012 Jennifer Bourn

Now that you know the 8 components of a successful website opt-in box, you have all the information you need to create an awesome opt-in box. But, even though your opt-in box has all the right pieces and works the right way … it may not actually work to build your list?

What?!

If your free offer — the thing you’re giving away for free in exchange for their name and email address — isn’t what your visitors want or need, they won’t sign up and enter their name and email, even if your opt-in box is awesome!

When Your Website Home Page Isn’t The Entry Point

May 11, 2011 Jennifer Bourn

Your home page is one of the most critical pieces of your website, and if you use a squeeze page, splash page, or some other form of home page with little-to-no content, you’re shooting yourself in the foot!

Search engines value high quality, relevant content and links. That means that content and links into your website are the top things they are looking for when they are scanning websites and indexing pages to include in the search results.

To search engines, your home page is considered the main page and entry point of your website, so it needs to include valuable, relevant, high-quality content.

If you really want to benefit from high organic search engine rankings, you MUST put effort into your home page. Now I’m not talking about putting a lot of effort into writing your home page content once and not touching it again for months at a time. I’m talking about tweaking and testing different headlines, keyword combinations, bold text, and even the design of your home page.

Planning a Successful Small Business Website

March 18, 2011 Jennifer Bourn

Often when we start working with a new client, they are anxious to get their site up quickly and want to jump into the website design process and get started right away. But design isn’t the first step in the process of creating a successful small business website. Before we get started on the design of any client site, we first need to work with our clients to plan the site.

Planning a small business website can be a daunting task, but it will make a huge difference in your conversion rates, sales, and results you see from the site.

Here is a list of things you need to take into consideration and plan for before you get started on the design of your website:

A Website Footer Is For More Than Your Copyright Notice

February 21, 2011 Jennifer Bourn

I guarantee that if you browse the internet for any length of time, you’ll notice that while some websites put a lot of information in their website footer, most simply use it as a space to put their copyright notice and maybe, just maybe if you’re lucky their contact information.

Like your website sidebar, the footer of your website is a very powerful part of your site that can make a big difference in your search engine rankings and how your website visitors move through your website, yet it is one of the most under-utilized tools.

Before I share with you some ideas on how you can leverage your website footer to improve your website and search engine rankings, I want to cover some of the biggest mistakes website owners make when it comes to their website footer: