Facelifting the home page for clearer explaning the business
Home page complexity
In our business we visit many websites as we need to evaluate if the sign-up for the 30-Day Free Trial can be granted or not.
In many cases it is hard to know what exactly the business of a company is:
- What they are selling
- Who they are selling to: consumers or businesses or both.
Apparently it is rather difficult to explain briefly the business of any company using a few titles and a few sentences on the home page. Many companies assume the visitor has a certain knowledge of their business and immediately address advantages or benefits.
Getting the right mix between explaining the business, positioning and benefits is a challenge.
In several cases the short intro on the “About us” or “The Company” page was the clearest explication.
The LEADSExplorer home page
Then we looked at our own home page and probably weren’t doing any better although we had a clear statement in the banner picture, which was probably overlooked by many as there the functionality wasn’t explained visually. The blurred picture hinted the solution, but didn’t clearly explain it.
We investigated our competitors to see how well or not they managed to communicate their web service for lead generation revealing the company name of the website visitors. Some of the competitors had good phrases or clear statements, but none had an appealing visual presentation.
Thus we decided to take action by changing:
- The first series of headers on the home page.
- The visuals.
Headers:
The first series of headers are important as they are key to the decision to investigate further or not on a webpage.
The visuals:
Just a picture and text aren’t enough as people want a video explaining the functionality. Preferably using a minimalist story in order to have a clear message.
This made us decide on using a flash movie explaining visually the main functionality of the web service in a banner.
Minimal and visual messages
The problem we encountered was to explain briefly what main functionalities of the LEADSExplorer web service:
- The unknown website visitors getting identified by company name.
- The indication of their interest.
We avoided mentioning all other functions, features and benefits as these would only clutter the story. The goal is to have people understand the basics in less than 10 seconds.
As a basis we wanted to re-use the picture that was in place in order not to confuse the regular visitors as the main image and layout would remain the same.
We have trialed several versions before finally settling on this more sophisticated version with intriguing flashes which you can watch here.
Now we are curious about the effect on our visitors.
And eager to know your comments and remarks on these changes.
More from LEADS Explorer
- The persistent salesman gets the conversation started
- Get-to-the-Point selling
- The need of leads drives to change the Home page
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I think that design is a process that has to remain ongoing- you do not want to over whelm your visitor, but you do want to be sticky so you can get that conversion. Thinking out a call for action route is very powerful, your cost per lead did make me click for more info, to bad you couldn’t do it as an on the fly calculator or something like that