The homepage is the landing space for everyone who seeks you out online. It should be well laid out and organized. It should let your brand breathe and not be crowded. Too much text or copy on the homepage can overwhelm your audience. Think of your homepage like a jacket cover to a book. It should have a picture, a title (or branding tagline), your name and a description of what the site is about. Make it short and condensed. Your homepage tabs (also called verticals) are where your audience can go deeper into your site and find more information about your product and services. Anywhere from 5 to 7 is a good amount, the topic verticals can also have a drop down menu, which is helpful.

2 Key Tips to Remember:
The homepage is NOT about YOU, it’s about your CLIENT. It should engage and promote enthusiasm for your product. It should be outcome focused.

Pick a tagline that is geared towards the consumer and answers the question of how they will benefit from your product or service. Steve Job’s tagline for the iPod was “A thousand songs in your pocket.” In this tagline his target market is defined along with the benefit they will get in buying an ipod. It’s simple, short and clear.

More Tips:

Site readers have a shorten attention span and are always one click away to something else.

How can you really capture your audience? Give them something for free, develop a free opt-in on your homepage.

Have a logo.

Putting too much content on the homepage loses your audience. They are overwhelmed.

Make sure to have several people look over your site before you launch it. Errors happen.

Blogs are important and you should have one.

At Taz we love using Wordpress and highly recommend it!

I hope these tips are helpful! The homepage is your one chance to reach your target audience, it’s not often they come around twice. Make sure to spend time getting it done right by giving your brand some much deserved breathing room.

At Taz Solutions, here is exactly what we do:  we leverage free web tools to tell us every time our company name is mentioned.  We then visit the different sites and networks those comments were made on and read them and or respond to them if it makes sense.   Our Chief Branding Strategist was browsing Twitter one afternoon and notices a tweet that said “why is Taz Solutions never open when I need them”?    She instantly followed up the client and posted a response tweet “Taz Solutions is open during our normal business hours M-F 9-5 with someone on call 24/7.

Yes we went on the defensive a bit, but I had a deeper concern — that client.   The cost of getting a new client is much much higher then keeping a current one, so I wanted to make sure that client was taken care of.

Be proactive — it’s your brand out there.   I’ve seen too many cases where Brands have had their butts kicked by an angry customer.

Here are a few of the tools we leverage to audit our online brand:

• Google Alerts (program in all the different search phrases/keywords you want to be notified on)
• AllTop.com
• SPY
• Search.Twitter.com