How to write a hompage

When building a website it’s tempting to skip straight to the fun parts like designing out your homepage. You’ve probably already started looking at other sites

for creative inspiration and planning what functionality you want.

Let’s review our three homepage options:

1-If you are using your homepage as a landing page for your primary product or service, skip to this section on how to write a service page.

2-If your #1 website goal is to increase email subscribers, you’ll be creating an “Upside Down” Homepage (explained in this section).

3-If #1 and #2 don’t apply to you, you’ll be using your homepage as a brand building and redirection page (also covered in this section).

By the end of this section, you’ll have a targeted homepage working on your behalf and helping facilitate an intentional customer journey.

The Upside Down Homepage.

The “Upside Down” homepage is ONLY used when your #1 website goal is increasing website subscribers. Both the concept and moniker were coined by Growth Tools and focus on asking for the visitor’s email at the top of the page rather than at the bottom of the page.

Here’s how it works:

The hero shot (visible part of page when you first arrive) includes some form of email signup.

Immediately below the hero shot, show some social proof if possible.

Then tell a brand story that describes how you encountered a problem or challenge your readers are also facing… and how you solved it.

with them being invited to give you their email in exchange for a resource you’ve created to help them solve that same problem.

Make sure there aren’t more than 3–4 options in your topside menu. The fewer, the better.

That’s it! Easy

Our brand building homepage is going to be comprised of 5 goals

1-Brand value proposition
2-Condensed brand story
3-Social proof
4-Redirects
5-CTA
You aren’t limited to these pieces, and in some cases, you might not need all of them, but in most cases, this is what you want on your homepage.

The Brand Builder Homepage

The “Brand Builder Homepage” is my version of the classic homepage.

What do businesses do with their homepage when they offer multiple products or services, each with a difference pitch and target audience?

If they are smart, they will typically use their homepage as a “catch all” page and then redirect readers to one of their service or product pages, where they can engage with a more targeted, offer-specific pitch.

But it’s also important that these businesses are taking full advantage of that premium homepage real estate, so I like to use the space to make a great opening impression for the brand and drive home the unique value they bring to the table.

That’s what the Brand Builder Homepage is all about — selling the brand and then redirecting visitors to the right page.

Here’s how to create one.

1. Write your brand value proposition.
When people arrive on your brand-building homepage, we want them to immediately understand the point of the business.

Why does this business exist?

If they can’t answer that within about 5 seconds, the copy is failing.

This is not a product or service value proposition. We probably won’t be talking about benefits or solving problems, unless those things define the business as a whole and everything it offers.

With a brand value proposition, we are focused specifically on the brand’s core identify as it relates to the target customer.

We needed to connect the organization’s identity to what the customer is consciously seeking, hence the value proposition headline: “Healthy Organizations Perform Better”

This is a really simple, compelling statement that immediately tells you what this business is all about.

That said, it still needed more. While it’s powerful, it’s also too vague if left on it’s own, and that’s why we immediately followed it up with a longer subheader that describes exactly what the business offers.

2. Write a condensed brand story.
The goal of our value proposition is to grab the right people by the hand and say, “Hey, hold up, this is exactly what you’re looking for. Stick around and see what we have to say.”

Now we need to say something.

This is where I like to hit ’em with the brand story. Not the long version that might fit on an about page or service page. We just want to tell them a condensed, quick-hit story of what the brand is all about.

The simplest way to write a brand story is to describe the challenge or problem your brand was created to solve and then talk about how you solve it.

we expanded on what was started in the value proposition — connecting organizational health to productivity and performance.

There are a lot of ways to do this, but remember, it’s not about you. It’s about the version of you that your customers most care about — the aspects of what you do that will most tangibly change their lives and businesses.

3. Show visitors your social proof.

When it comes to a brand building page, you really can’t overdo social proof.

After all, the entire point of social proof is to prove that what you are saying about yourself isn’t empty BS. The more social proof you have — and the more types of social proof — the better.

Highlighting the brands you’ve worked with can be really powerful, especially when visitors are likely to recognize the brands, and it’s a really easy way to quickly establish your credibility.

Testimonials that speak directly to the hopes and concerns of your potential clients can be particularly powerful. I like to take the hardest hitting line from a testimonial and use it as a headline.

If you field reviews for your business, you can also display your review scores, either by displaying a sample of real, positive review or showing an accumulated review score.

And speaking of Proof, live social proof in the form of a little pop up telling visitors that someone purchased, signed up, or otherwise converted recently is all the rage these days.

From what I’ve seen, these popups are especially powerful on landing pages receiving targeted traffic from paid advertising, but they can be added to any page:

You get the idea. If you have it, flaunt it.

The only other thing you have to decide is where you put this stuff on your homepage.

Ideally, you want to place available social proof wherever it is going to best enhance your message and contribute to the desired action.

I like to include at least one piece of social proof as early as the hero shot in order to immediately provide some proof that the business is legit. A “brand bar” — thin bar displaying 3–5 logos from the most prestigious companies you’ve worked with, does a great job of providing credibility without distracting from your message.

Next, I like to match testimonial content to copywriting content if possible. In other words, if I a testimonial talks about how the product benefited the customer, I’ll include it next to the copy section where we talk about how the product benefits customers.

I also like to make social proof visible at places on the page where I’m trying to motivate an action, since it acts as an additional push towards conversion.

There’s no single right answer here. Just try to think through where your available social proof would provide the most benefit and place it there.

4. Redirect visitors to the appropriate action page.

Since in this case, you aren’t using your homepage as a service, product, or signup page, your goal is probably to get visitors to one of those pages, so they can take action and meet your #1 site objective.

After all, telling people about your brand is great, but it’s not why you built the website.

You want visitors to take a specific action.

Yur homepage is serving as a catch-all page. Anyone who arrives for any purpose is immediately getting the elevator pitch for your brand, and then you want to whisk them off to the appropriate service, product, or other action page.

The only real question here is how many different places do you try to whisk people off to from the homepage?

One? Two? Ten?

First of all, the answer is never “one”. If it was, I wouldn’t be having you create a brand-building page; you’d use your homepage as a landing page for thatsingular objective.

Past that , it’s a judgement call, but like with everything on your site, less is usually more.

If you have a lot of products or services, and your revenue is fairly evenly distributed among most of them, you might decide to provide redirects to all of them on your homepag or you might decide to choose your top two/three/six and only redirect to those, letting people navigate to other options via your menu.

There’s not really a definitively right answer here. Just try to think through what makes the most sense for incoming visitors and then do that.

In my experience, a lot of companies wait far too long before eliminating underperforming products or services from their offering. If you have an offer that

nobody ever responds to, you probably don’t want it taking up the limited real estate on your homepage.

5. Make sure you include enough CTAs.

A “Call to Action” (CTA) is a place on your page where you tell the reader to do something. It’s the copywriting equivalent of a sales close.

You want to include a CTA at any point on your page where the reader might be in the mental position to click… and since it’s hard to know where that will be…

you basically just want to include it every other screen.

For your homepage, I like to include a CTA within the hero shot, then another one at the end. If you place your redirects underneath your brand story, then that’s

it’s own set of CTAs, but if not, make sure to include some sort of CTA immediately following the brand story. Finally, ALWAYS have a CTA at the end of the page.

So where do your CTAs point?

Most service businesses want to get the visitor to fill out a contact form, so for the homepage, I recommend pointing the non-redirect CTAs directly at your contact page. This allows people who are returning to your site or simply anxious to get started the chance to skip straight to the desired action and get in touch with you.

For product businesses, it’s going to come down to your main goal. Do you want to get people into your email nurturing funnel or go for the immediate sale? The answer will determine where you send them.

If you offer a small selection of products, you might want to have a brief feature of each product on the homepage, each with a product-specific CTA. If you offer a large selection of products, you want to have a brief feature for each product class that points it’s CTA to that category.