There's No Place Like A
Home-Business Home Page
Contributed by Elaine Landau
If you have decided to open up a home business, you have taken a giant step towards financial independence. To ensure success, you must educate yourself. What is the market like for your product or service? Are there any direct competitors? Do you have a pool of prospective clients? How do you want to advertise? How do people find your product or service? These questions and more should be answered before you throw the family savings into the pot and start spending.
If you are a home-business owner, you may be asking if the Internet is going to be part of your business plan. Will you choose to sell your products over the Internet? If you are comfortable using a computer, you probably have basic computer education. If you have basic Internet training, or have taken a free Internet lesson, you may want to expand your knowledge by discovering free Internet tutorials and free Internet training. The more you understand the Internet, the better you will understand how you can use the Internet to grow your business.
If you believe that a web site is essential to your home-business success, you need to look very carefully at how you are going to develop your home page. It is the first thing a prospective customer will look at when arriving at your web site. Whether they stay or leave is entirely up to how well you’ve thought through your home page.
Get their attention.
The more traffic, or hits, your web site generates, the more opportunities you have to sell your product or service. Your home page, or index page, has to be a stunner. So how do you do that?
- Dazzle them with drama, not clutter. If your home page inspires a migraine, you will lose customers. Some excited home-business owners think they have to present everything all at once. This is not the Guinness Book of World Records. We don’t want to see how many pictures, contests, links, offers, buttons, colors, or moving objects can fit onto one home page. Too much is indeed too much. If you want to convey a fun, creative site, keep your home page inviting and readable. Have headlines that punch and pictures that please. The visitor wants to stay; don’t push him/her away with bold bad taste.
- Affiliate links may help make your site profitable, but you do not want to mess up your home page with a litter of links. Search engines, such as Google™, tend to rank link-filled home pages lower than home pages focused on their own business. The content of your home page should be solidly promoting your web site’s main theme. By doing so, your targeted market will find you and your site will move up the search engines faster. Remember, you want to be Googled often and by someone who knows how.
- Write your site content and design your web site to appeal to your customer, not necessarily to you or your friends. Your customers’ demographics and psychographics may be completely contrary to your lifestyle, but unless you recognize your customers’ hobbies, interests, educations, and backgrounds, you may be creating a web site with no audience and no target market.
- Keep your message simple and honest. Don’t get carried away with amazing claims and unbelievable offers. Many Internet users are wary of too-good-to-be-true offers. Online scams, spyware and adware have made users uneasy and unwilling to click on links that look even remotely suspicious.
- Create clear paths. Be sure the pages connected to your home page relate to the theme of your web site. If your web site is focused on dogs, the connected pages should relate to health issues for dogs, canine hygiene, dog dentistry, puppies, etc. If the first page a visitor clicks on has him/her arriving at a page touting the latest sci-fi movies, you are sending mixed messages and wasting the visitor’s time. Resentment is not a good thing to foster with your web site.
Hopefully some of these suggestions will help your thought process when developing your home page. Just remember, your home business is your creation. Create a home page that reflects your energy, creativity, and pride.
About the Author:
Elaine Landau is a freelance writer, publicist, web site editor, and television writer with more than 15 years of experience in marketing, advertising, and publicity.
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