A homepage is simply a landing page -- that’s it. Granted, it could be the most important landing page on your site, but the fact remains that the homepage is just a landing page.

Many people try to have their homepage do far too much, but as with all landing pages its job is to introduce, establish a fit, and ask the visitor to take an action.

Let’s run through some common mistakes.

Okay, I get it, you have to get a site up because you’ve got an upcoming event or because your last site was eaten by spambots, or because you’re new and you need a web presence as you get your product or service to market. That's cool, but don't let the quick fix become your permanent homepage!

You might know this one: you buy a WordPress template that offers a handful of page layouts, get it all installed and configured, and then simply swap out the placeholder images and copy with your own branded images and text, et voilà! — Homepage complete!

Yeah, that’s never a very good idea as none of these templates allow the customer to craft a unique brand narrative. I’ll get to that later on.

Homepage as Directory. I see this all the time and it really shocks me: people who either by design or by accident turn their homepage into some sort of shopping mall directory.

Look, when you visit Disneyland the theme park directory is a vital part of your stay but in the web world we have navigation menus to handle that sort of thing. Your homepage should not read like the directory in a professional building. Remember, the homepage is a landing page -- not a directory page, or a sitemap.

One of the biggest mistakes folks make on their homepage: Their messaging is all about themselves and is not about the customer.

Consider this: If your homepage is not about your customer it's a vanity page and nobody buys from a vanity page.

Homepages need to be customer-centric. The messaging must be presented to apply directly to the visitors' needs. We must speak to the value provided to your customers.

Unclear narrative. No customer journey. Each homepage section needs a reason to exist or it should not exist. Each section contains a message and each message sets up the next message. Flow. We must earn each and every click and nowadays we must also earn the next scroll. Which brings us to the next mistake (see what I did there? Flow)

Your homepage - and this is true for any landing page - exists in order to get people to take an action. The actions can vary from page to page though you'll likely have a small handful of ideal actions peppered throughout your site.

For example: The purpose of my own homepage is to entice my visitors to either fill out my contact form to initiate a dialog OR to get them to view either my Services offerings or my Portfolio. The Services pages and the Portfolio pages are then optimized to squeeze the visitor through a flow designed to get them to fill out my contact form. For me, it’s all about the contact form.

You know that friend who wants to ask you for a favor but can’t come out and just ask for it so they need to tell a lengthy and tedious story for the better part of a shared lunch before they can finally get to the point? You know at least one person who does this. You’d be shocked at how common it is for homepage messaging to be presented in the same way.

This is something I refer to as "Over-involved C-Suite Syndrome". Small marketing teams will often receive frequent requests of their Executive team to keep adding component after component to the homepage, and they don't feel they can push back (or don't know how to support the argument for not destroying the homepage with volumes of data that should go elsewhere on the site.)

The unfortunate result is a homepage that quickly becomes a catch-all for all sorts of junk that dilutes the overall narrative and makes for a big mess of the site’s most important page. It happens, and it's not pretty - but it is preventable.

• SORT (the right visitor from the wrong visitor)
• INSPIRE (build trust, convey competence, make a case for making a decision now)
• CONVERT (turn the visitor into a customer, or a subscriber, or getting them into the sales pipeline)

There’s a variation on this for visitors who are already ready to buy and are looking for more information (you know, all of that information that you need to remove from the homepage and put somewhere else?)
This variation is:

• SORT
• INFORM
• CONVERT

There are many ways to set a homepage up to deliver on the SORT - INSPIRE - CONVERT flow, but one thing that these ways will have in common is that they are INTENTIONAL.

This takes work. It takes attention to detail. And it requires us to understand your ideal visitors' needs so that we can speak to those needs, calm their concerns, establish trust and competence, and then make a request for them to take an action.

It’s also vital that the request for action that we make of the visitor does not feel to them as being disproportionate to the level of trust that you’ve established with them thus far.

My SEO/Google Ads partner Tyler Suchman asked me to mention that businesses should always have the full address and phone in the site footer, including a link to a google map if the business is open to the public or clients. This helps Google to appropriately geo-tag the business, relate it to other profiles (like MerchantCircle and Yelp), and it helps populate the business in local search, on Google Maps, etc.

Thanks for reading, and I appreciate any thoughts or feedback you might have. You can simply reply to this email if you’ve got something on your mind.

You’re an absolute rockstar if you’ve made it this far, and I appreciate your time and attention.

All the best,
Christopher