Part Two: Homepage Re-Design – Understand Your Audience

To re-cap the first part of our homepage re-design series, the key to a strong homepage is clarity, conciseness and consistency. A good homepage clearly outlines what your organization is all about, where users can go (and where they want to go) and why users should even be at your web site.

Internet users are creatures of short attention spans. You have only a few seconds to grab, hold and increase the interest of your user. It seems like an impossible feat to accomplish, but it is doable if you understand your audience.

Getting inside the heads of your audience – whether they’re young or old, rich or poor, smart or dumb – is nothing new. Good marketing dictates this.
However, for the web, only a handful of organizations actually do this research.

Why is that?

This line of thinking seems to fall back on the old cliche that if you “build it they will come.” The operative word in that last sentence is “cliche.” That’s what it is. A myth. A baseless argument.

And that’s what we’re going to fix.

So, step one in creating an effective homepage – and dare I say it, web site – is to understand your audience. To get inside their heads. To think like they do. To want what they want.

This is no simple task. You have to sit down and dedicate some time to ask yourself some pretty heavy questions. You have to think like your user. Let’s roll through some of those questions.

• Who do I want buying my products or services (or making donations if you’re a non-profit)? Who is my ideal customer?
• What exactly – in the eyes of my clients, prospects and partners – does my organization do?
• Why do I have clients? What did I do to gain their trust?
• What do the people I’m serving want? Not what do they get – what do they really want?
• What do my prospects do? How do they live, conduct business, travel, eat and so on?
• How do the people I want to sell to use the Internet?

As you can see, these are not easy to answer. But they’re basic questions that any smart organization can answer. And the answers hold the key to a successful homepage.

Depending on how in-depth you want to go, I would recommend creating basic user profiles. A user profile is a summary of a type of person who you want visiting your web site. For example, a bank might have “Cash Conscious Joe” as a profile for a user who doesn’t like to keep a lot of money in their account.

The user profile is powerful because it quickly sketches out in a tangible form a set of guidelines you can follow. By running design and content decisions by your user profiles, you can figure out if your decisions are a good fit.
And that’s how you can craft a powerful homepage. Using the research you’ve collected about your ideal users, you can begin to understand what they’re looking for from an organization like yours.

For example, if the bank were trying to target “Cash Conscious Joe” to convince him (or her) to keep money in their account, they might feature educational articles on the homepage explaining why banks are safe.

The most basic questions you’ll want to answer for your users are:

• What is this site?
• What can I do here?
• Why should I be here?
• Does it serve the needs I’m after?

And using what you’ve understood from your audience, you can answer these questions in a specific, value-driven fashion that will guide users toward a strong call to action.

Stay tuned for Part Three: Understanding Your Competitors.