Online Manual - 4 Characteristics of a Good Home Page
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4 Characteristics of a Good Home Page

There are four main characteristics that any web page should posses to ensure maximum traffic, to keep users at your site for extend periods of time, and to keep them coming back for more.

Clear | Easily Navigated | Substance | Fast

Clear

First, your page should be very clear and to the point. The reader should be able to determine exactly what he or she will find throughout your site just by looking at the first page. All important information should be right up there at top, even if it means sacrificing some really good looking logo.

It is nice if all the critical information is located at the top and the user does not need to scroll down in order to determine if he/she has come to the right place.

You don't want to clutter up the beginning of the page with lots of confusing links or graphics. Keeping things simple is always the best bet, but it depends upon your business. If you are a graphic artist, or a musician, then you will probably want to have lots of high energy graphic work to call attention to your page.

Don't put endless paragraphs of text in your pages either. Reading text on a computer screen can get very tiring after a while. Keep your sentences short and to the point.

Easily Navigated

After making your site clear, you want to make it easily navigable with large or obvious buttons to click and descriptions telling the user where he/she will be transported. This is another aspect of poor built home pages that frustrate users. As you are competing with more and more web sites, users will tend to gravitate to those sites offering information the fastest. That means they will go to those sites in which they have learned to navigate easily.

The key to good navigation is good organization of your site. Generally, different bits of information should appear on different pages. This not only helps you better organize your site and help you create good navigation for the user to follow, but it also increases the number of pages you have out on the web. And as mentioned in my "Saturation Plan", the more pages the better.

Once you find a good navigation technique and you think your pages are organized so that people can easily find all information, then don't change it. Frequent visitors to your site will know exactly which links to press to get to the information that they are looking for, and if you are constantly changing the way you have your home page navigation buttons or links set up, then they will get frustrated.

Now this is not to say that you should never change your home pages. Actually, your main home page should remain pretty much the same because you want that vital information at the top. And you want to keep your navigation links pretty much the same. But the rest of your pages should change somewhat to give variety.

Substance

In order to keep people interested in your pages and to keep them coming back, you need to offer them something valuable. Just placing a page with an ad for your "widget" may be enough if you have a super product that sells itself. But if you are selling a normal product, service, or are just trying to get some publicity for your company, then you need to entertain or inform your readers.

Many sites will offer helpful information relating to the product they are selling. For example, the company selling tropical fish might give helpful hints as to how to set up an aquarium, which fish can live together, what types of diseases to look for, and so on. They might offer a frequently asked question (FAQ) section and allow people to write in with their aquarium related questions. Readers then have a reason to frequent your site and learn something. Chances are, if they purchase tropical fish On-Line, they will go with you, rather than a guy with a single page site advertising his fish for sale.

Whatever information you can afford to give, provide it. This is what many sites are doing these days. Many businesses are actually publishing free newsletters On-Line which offer advice and allow people to write in with questions.

Another example is that of my client at Associated Radon Services who check buildings for radon and, if found, eliminate this harmful buildup of gas. Instead of simply advertising his business on the web and telling the world what it is he does, he also explains all about radon and why it is harmful. And he provides many links to government sites and other sites that offer more information about radon so that the reader can better inform themselves.

If giving advice or information does not apply to your product or service, then the next best thing to do is entertain. You can do this in any number of ways. You could have puzzles on your site, you could have links to many interesting sites that relate to your business, so that people will use your page first when searching for information in that field. Or you could just tell a joke everyday.

The idea here is just to give the user a reason for coming back to your site over and over, and telling his friends about your site.

Fast

Finally, you want your page to load quickly. Unfortunately, the majority of Internet users are still on 14.4 kbps modems, and that won't change for probably the next 12-18 months. Regardless of the speed modem, the quicker your page loads, the less chance that someone will get bored of waiting and move on.

The major bottleneck in preventing a page from downloading quickly is images. Images are an essential part of the WWW, and you should have images in your home page. The key disadvantage to images is that they are slow to download because they take up so much space. There are a few ways in which to make your graphics download quicker.

First, you should use the appropriate format. The general rule of thumb is to use GIF format for small icons, graphics, and logos. For photographs, use JPG. There are several reasons for this. Number one, JPG has a better compression algorithms that make for smaller image sizes. Number two, is that JPG images can support millions of colors where GIF's can only support 256 colors, making your photos seem dull.

Secondly, you should keep image sizes as small as possible. Many images can be resized and made smaller without loosing quality. Many smaller images placed about a web page give a better look than one large image.

Also, use only the number of colors that you actually need. If you have a company logo, that is scanned in as a GIF, and that uses only 16 colors, then reduce the number of colors from 256 to 16 for the image. You can you any number of graphic programs to do this; many are shareware.

Finally, you can reduce the image resolution. Depending upon what resolution the image was scanned in at, you may want to reduce this. Most monitors that people are using today are displaying at a resolution of about 75 dpi. I recommend using 114 or 148. Anything over 200 dpi is purely a waste unless you are using the Internet to transfer photos to others who will print them out on a professional printer.

Note: The newer browsers like Microsoft's newest version of Explorer and Netscape 3.0 have a feature that display all the text of a document first, and then display the images. This enables the user to read the text while waiting for the images to load, and works pretty good. However, the time to download the entire document the way you planned it to be seen and browsed, still takes the same amount of time.


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