Does Your Homepage have ADD?

Why most homepages are overwhelming and stressed out.

Homepages are under pressure. They need to speak to multiple personas, they need to wow people, and they need to tell a company's story. They often try to do too much and as a result do little.

The goal of a homepage is to move the visitor along the funnel via a Call to Action (CTA). Sometimes that means trying to convert right up front, otherwise it's to move the visitor to the next step.

But there's not much time.

"55% of visitors spend fewer than 15 seconds on your website." Hubspot

That's 15 seconds for the entire time on your site, not just your homepage.

The best way to engage and move people along in that amount of time is to simplify and unify the design. As an in-depth study on web design asserts "Unity allows the viewer to see the parts related and integrated as a whole - this is the target of any composition design" (The Effect of Aesthetics on Web Credibility).

Examples

Here are two examples.

Early on Google took a different approach than Yahoo with their design. Google displayed one thing, a search field while Yahoo filled their page up with news, events, and lot's of content in addition to the search form. Yahoo was the leader, Google the upstart - it's easy to see Google's approach was successful.

Unity, simplicity and focus on what is most important to the visitor, whether it's functionality (e.g. Google) or a value proposition or products or stories will help improve the performance of a homepage. And then when someone asks you, "Does your homepage have ADD?" you can say "Nah, we know what our clients want and kept it simple."