Home Page Design

1. Give people an idea of what you site is about. What is your Unique Value Proposition

2. Show people what you sell and help them get to what they want with as little effort as posible.

The home page is an interesting and important page for many eCommerce sites but serves a different purpose depending on the type of site and how people discover your products. This may not be where most people enter your site and be the first impression or the starting point in the shopping experiance.  In other cases users may land on a product detail page from an external website such as google and never visit your home page.

One main goal for the home page is to tell people what your site sells the sites UVP. For a well known site such as Walmart the home page may not have to tell the user the types of product they sell but for smaller or less know brands this is important. This information is often available in the header but the home page gives a little more room to elaborate. For those that do use the home page as a starting point you want to make it as easy as posible for the customer to find what they are looking for. Highlighting a search bar, listing popular products or top categories and showing deals are often great uses of the page. We also want to make sure that people, especially those new to the site or store, trust you and feel they are making a smart decision by choosing your store. This can be done using trust signals such as security badges, awards, social proof, contact and return information, payment information, social mission, or any there reason you are the right choice for the potential shopper.

We must also remember that the home page is often a starting point for other target audiences that may not be the product consumer. Partner such as distributers,  manufactures, potential investors or potential employees will also be looking at yours site to decide if you are a good fit. In this case the customer is not the only target audience and showing trust signals and information geared for these people may be different but just as important as information for the customer.