10 Simple Website Homepage Design Ideas For your Small Business

Every visitor of your website is likely to first land on your homepage than any other page of your site. A home page serves as a door to your website upon which new visitors enter to explore your products or services. Any homepage that is well-designed and easy to navigate is likely to attract more visitors who will eventually become paying customers. On the other hand, a badly designed homepage might turn away a lot of potential customers. 

A homepage allows you to do a number of things at the same time. If you’re a hotel reservation website with branches spread across the world, for instance, your home page is expected to serve different audiences from different locations. This is exactly what you’ll experience when you land on the Trivago website. 

“For the homepage in order to deliver great results, it needs to first capture the attention of the visitor,” says Priscilla Lurie, a web designer specializing in eCommerce sites. “Then focus on directing the user where they should go next. Once you achieve those key two things, it becomes quite easy to convert your new visitors into buyers,” she explains. 

What should the homepage include?

There are certain key features that should be on every homepage of a website, no matter what industry or the size of a business. They include a recognizable logo, a headline, visually appealing photos, engaging content,  informational footer, a tempting call-to-action, and easy to navigate menus. Any homepage that doesn’t have any of the above-mentioned features will not be an effective marketing tool for growing a business

4 Great Homepage examples

Let’s examine four of the best home pages, along with tidbits of insight into what makes them spark interest.    

• Green Mountain Energy

The first thing that will take your breath away about this home page is its simplicity. It is easy to navigate, to read content, and has all the key elements of a home page which are – a responsive menu, an animated image that tells you everything about Green Mountain Energy nature of the business, and content that hits the mark.

• thredUP

This online store has one of the most stunning homepage designs that most eCommerce don’t have. Once you land on the homepage, you get a good idea of what the store sells, who it targets, and the current specials. The web designers made a sterling job of using a mixture of different fonts that complement the brand well.

• Trivago

If you’re looking for inspiration on how to create a great homepage for your eCommerce, then check this website out. It is simple and easy to access, even when you use your mobile device. What’s more, the Trivago homepage detects your location and automatically shows prices according to the currency of the country you are in. The homepage was built on a white background, which matches the logo well.

• Designed By Women

It comes as no surprise that this stunning website has recently won an award. The homepage is well-designed and doesn’t take you a long time to figure out what the business is all about. The content is engaging enough to keep you reading the entire page. And the used graphic is visually appealing.

How can a home page convey the brand’s voice?

If you describe your brand voice in three words, what would it be? Let’s say you choose vibrant, young, and witty. All your website content should represent those three characteristics. Always ensure that your copywriters, graphic designers, and web designer know how to incorporate your brand voice on your home page, and other parts of your website.

Go through each and every design and content that they have created and ensure that it conveys your brand voice well. Over and above that, your home page which will be the first page people visit should have a distinct voice that will make your brand stand out.

Why You Shouldn’t Design Your Own Homepage Using An Online Website builder?

It’s tempting for entrepreneurs with limited website design skills to use drag and drop website builders such as Weebly and Wix to build their homepages. But there is a lot more that goes into building a great homepage that you’re not likely to master unless you are a Wix or Weebly specialist. “A home page needs a logo, a call-to-action, a mission statement, and most of the menus that will help visitors to navigate a website,” says Joseph Awa, a freelance website designer who has been helping Canada and USA-based clients since 2010. According to Joseph, menus should be the first thing visitors should see on every website. Another aspect of a great homepage is color. It should always compliment your logo well. If you get color wrong, your brand identity may be immensely compromised by this.  So if you want your homepage to be easy to use and navigate, it’s advisable that you hire a professional website designer to create it for you, either in-house or through an outsourcing platform.

Remember, your company’s homepage accounts for up to 50 percent of your site’s total page views. 

Here are 10 simple website homepage design ideas that you can consider using:  

• Consider using retro and vintage fonts

If you want your homepage to attract and keep people longer on your site, then you should consider using retro fonts. They will help to create contrast from the color of the text to the background design. Apart from that, retro fonts will make your homepage to be appealing and unique to visitors of your site. That said, finding the right and unique retro and vintage font that will suit your brand can be a challenge; as some retro and vintage fonts are not suitable for websites. Hence it is always wise to allow your web designer to help you choose the right retro and vintage font for your business. Some well-known retro and vintage fonts include:

•  Roman-serif, which has a classic bookish feel to it, and was favored mostly by publishing companies in the 60s until advertising agencies realized how unique this font can be. 
•  ITC Lubalin Graph is used by IBM on their logo design. This doesn’t mean you can’t still use it on your homepage as well. 
• Gatsby is another vintage font you should experiment with. It can be suitable for the entertainment and automobile industries. 
• While Nexa Rust is a rough version of the popular Nexa and Nexa Slab families, it can still work well on a homepage. 
• If you’re after a decorative free retro font, try Stiff Staff.  

2. Use 3 D visuals

The advantages of using 3D visuals on your homepage are many. They include enhancing your visual communication and engaging the visitors of your website. The only drawback is, using 3D graphics in a web interface is not easy. It requires someone with an artistic eye, and who has done it before. Finding that person is easy if you know where to look. This platform is the first place you should look.

3. Incorporate augmented reality (AR) content on your homepage

You might be wondering, AR? Yes! AR is here to stay and it can be incorporated on your homepage as well. Your next question should be how exactly do I include AR content on my homepage, and why? Well, AR can be suitable for homepages of business that specializes in e-commerce, or in designing gaming apps, or even automobile dealers. In an e-commerce scenario, customers can use AR remotely to try a pair of sneakers without leaving their homes.  Car dealers such as Jeep also use AR to give customers a feeling of being inside a car.

4. Use visual scrollytelling

Scrollytelling or visual storytelling allows brands to tell a story in the most impactful manner. It will be suitable for businesses that have been around for a couple of years. For instance, you can use visual scrollytelling to tell the story of your business. You can add a playback option for users to scroll play your story as many times as they want. It will help to make your homepage interesting to visitors.

5. Use

Whatever images that you’ll choose for your homepage always make sure that they are authentic. “Instead of using stock images, why don’t use your own images instead? Today you don’t need to own an expensive camera in order to take stunning photographs. All you need is your iPhone,” says Joseph Awa.

6. Add video Content

So instead of cramming your homepage with only text, add an explainer video. 85% of internet users within the U.S. consume content through online video. Make sure you use keywords in the video title, descriptions, and tags to give your site an additional SEO boost.

7. Include a call-to-action

This one goes without saying, if your home page does not have a call-to-action, then it will be essentially impossible to convert visitors into buying customers. Likewise, if your call-to-action is not visible or unclear, people will miss it.  Always make sure that your call-to-action is clear and simple for people to understand.

8. Use an animated logo

Animated elements have become a core part of designing a great website. If you haven’t experimented with them just yet, maybe you should consider doing so in 2021 

Logo animation is one of the best ways to make your website stand out. 

9. Make your homepage simple

Whatever modern trend you try this year, always make sure that your homepage remains simple.  A minimalist approach goes a long way in keeping your homepage attractive and fresh in the eyes of the customers. “Include only the most essential elements on your homepage,” says Akash Prasad Sansare who has been designing websites for decades. Minimalism will not only make your homepage user-friendly but appealing as well. If visitors like what they see, they’ll either continue scrolling and exploring, or they’ll take action.

10. Customize your cursors

Designers use CSS to control the appearance of a cursor. Normally, designers find inspiration to design cursors online. There are plenty of options available to designers online where they can choose, on CSS-Tricks. Designers can customize the cursor to mimic user interaction. For example, when a user hovers a cursor on a link it changes from an arrow to a hand. Another example: The jQueryUI can make objects draggable. 

Lastly, whatever homepage design idea you choose, always make sure that it helps to make an indelible first impression, and contributes toward driving the user journey into your conversion funnels. If you want to create the kind of homepage that will allow converting more leads, it’s crucial to design it with user-intent in mind.