The 5 Second Home Page Rule: 3 Things Your Front Page Must Do in Your Visitor’s First Five Seconds On-Site
by IdeaPro ~ June 1st, 2009Click a Star to Rate This Post
(115 votes, average: 4.94 out of 5)
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An unknown secret about web marketing is this — you only have 5 seconds to accomplish 3 things after a visitor clicks into your home page. Research proves that if customers don’t see what they’re looking for immediately, they simply press the back button and you lose them. If you give what they need in those few seconds, then you can easily keep them onsite for another 30 minutes or even longer. And, during that much longer visit, your chances of making a sale are immeasurably bigger.
That means on the very top of your front or home page “above the fold,” you must present these 3 main ideas simply, dramatically, and persuasively — and do it fast!
Here they are — the 3 things that must be done for every new visitor, in only 5 seconds
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- Establish what it is you do, what is the nature of your business — not just its name or logo design, not just a feeling about something, but actually precisely what you do. This best done with a story telling photograph. Mottos and slogans, descriptive text or blurbs… none of these will do the job. Everyone ignores self serving slogans and claims. Photographs are perceived, believed, and remembered. A good story telling photo beats a thousand fatuous, adjectives about how expert, famous, friendly and wonderful you are. Simply show them what you do, period.
- Next, you must show them WHY what you do is better than the unnamed competition. Telling them is not enough. You must show them. Can you photograph the MAIN ADVANTAGE you have over your competition? If you can’t, you haven’t thought things through. There is always a way to photograph a product or service benefit — a comparative advantage over the “other guys.” Remember, photos are perceived, believed and remembered. Drawings and so-called ‘graphics’ aren’t believed, simply because everyone knows they are artificial. Since they aren’t believed, they aren’t filed away for future reference. They are quickly forgotten. An advantage photographically illustrated and dramatized by a story telling photographic illustration is an impression made that is both understood, and filed away in the customers’ memories. Dramatize and memorialize your main advantage over your competition with clear, easy to understand and dramatic color photographic presentation. Put it at the top of your front page. Once done properly, your customer is ready to take action — they are ready to buy what you’re selling!
- Now make it easy for them to immediately buy something. Don’t merely link them to a distant page that walks them through long tedious details and lists of endless charts and graphs and more pages of needless arguments. Assume they are already convinced. In many cases they are! Take them to a page that CONFIRMS their buying decision. Let them buy what they already understand, and what you have dramatically illustrated and proven is in fact better. Many people will do so at once! Experience proves this. Should you have a more detailed page that answers every conceivable question? Absolutely. You could have dozens of these detailed pages, all thoroughly jammed with photographs showing each and every single imaginable detail about your product and service. You can have FAQ pages, comparison charts, spreadsheets, and on and on. But, on each and every one of these pages at the top and the bottom, you should make it extremely easy for your readers to dive out of the arguments and jump into the buying of what you’re selling.
After all, people only need ONE good reason to buy.
But, there can be hundreds of reasons that could possibly convince them NOT to buy. Everytime you bring up another discussion point, that’s an argument you could lose. When they’re convinced, let them buy!
When the customer says “yes,” the sale is over!
That means there needs to be a huge “buy now” button everytime you turn a page, every time you scroll down or up a page, everytime the customer pauses.
You don’t have all day. You have about 5 seconds to inform your visitor about precisely what you do, why it’s better, and to let them ACT on your offer.
Ten Clues You May Be Missing 99% of Your Potential Customers
1. Are you hiding your front or home page behind a “welcome” flash animation movie? These pages generally take several seconds to load, even on the fastest connections. You have only 5 seconds. The clock is ticking…
2. When customers come to your site for the first time — from a search engine like Google, Yahoo, or MSN, etc. — do they have to press an ENTER button to come in the front door, where they can finally see something about what you do, why it’s better and take action? Remember that every browser has a back button. The chances are, no matter how pretty and fancy your “doorway page” might be, most of your customers will simply press the BACK BUTTON instead of your ENTER button. If they do, you lose. So, don’t give them that chance. Bring them right to your main content page, immediately. Don’t be shy. They came to see, to understand, to be convinced, and yes — to buy! Let them do it and do it easily — and do it in seconds. The clock is ticking!
3. Have you filled your home page with off-the-shelf, cookie cutter graphic drawings and sketches — with “original” creativity and crazy layouts? Are wild colors and shapes dominating the front page landscape? Have you neglected taking actual photographs of what you and your staff does? No product photography? Nothing actually illustrating with clear, distinct photography what you do and why it’s better? Then nothing you say matters. People believe what they see, and only part of what they read or hear. Seeing is believing. No photographs? Then get ready for no customers, no business, no profits.
4. Are your pages filled with beautiful illustrations, but nothing tells a story? Good photographs are not nouns. They are verbs. Action is what you do. It’s what makes you better. A product or service product photograph that is “standing still” is one that is dead. Dead products don’t sell. They gather dust and sit on the shelf. Then, at some point, a banker comes along and puts a seal on your door, and your business becomes a tomb, full of dead stuff. Not a good picture? Then make your products and services come alive — make them MOVE and tell a story. What’s the story? Why your products or services are BETTER than the competition. Products (or services) in motion, that’s what a good website is all about. That’s a verb, not a noun. That’s alive, not dead. And, that creates real buyers from mere visitors, informs them, convinces them and drives them to ACTION. Motion — that’s what we want. Motion is the single driving force that unites your web design, that propels and persuades your customers, that raises your bottom line!
5. Are your pages full of long lines of text, more than 3 inches wide? Research demonstrates that readers read, comprehend, remember and act on text content that averages LESS THAN 3 INCHES across. The longer your lines of content, the less people read and ultimately act on. The longer the lines get, the more readers you lose — up to 30% or more readers drop out, for really wide column widths of several inches or more. Keep those lines or column widths short.
6. Are you using “full justification” or nice even edges on both the left and right of your columns? Bad choice. Research consistently shows that “ragged right” text alignment is more easily read, comprehended and remembered than fully justified paragraph alignment. You may lose 15% of readership due to this alone. Make those lines jaggedy on the right side. You’ll make more money!
7. Are you using one of those “modern” font faces like Arial, Helvetica, or another “san serif” text style? Think that it looks cleaner, easier to read, more stylish? Expect to lose another 20% or 30% of your readership, comprehension and visitor-to-buyer conversion ratios. For over 70 years, readership research has consistently shown that font styles with those funny little curly-queues at the ends of letters are more easily read by the vast majority of readers. Why? Scientists theorize that the brain is getting more visual clues and more easily defined shapes, so that letters and words can be more easily recognized and remembered. These “serifed” or more complex letter styles are actually easier for the eye-brain-connection to decode into ideas. In this case, fancier is better, not simpler. Use the serifed fonts like Georgia, Times, Garamond, Caslon, and similar font faces. Keep to the standard fonts that are included on most computers. But, keep them curly to increase sales!
8. Did your designer tell you that “reversed text” is more dramatic than all those boring white pages your competition is using? So, did you end up with huge areas of black, red, blue or some other dark color — using white or some light colored text over the dark backgrounds? Think that makes you more dramatic? Dramatic, maybe. Readable, comprehensible, memorable and persuasive — absolutely NOT. Those reversed fields of white text on colored or black backgrounds are simply not read, not remembered, and almost NEVER acted upon. How bad is this? Research shows that only a very small fraction of potential customers will read and act on large areas of reversed text. You could lose 80%, 90%, 95% or even more of your customers — compared to the same content as black text on white backgrounds. This has been true for all print media for many decades. This is not about design or style. It’s about how the eye and brain work to do the work of reading, comprehending, remembering and then acting on the data being presented. Keep your text in black, and make the backgrounds a very bright white. When the designer complains, tell them nothing is prettier than profits — those profits pay their salaries!
How bad is this text vs. background color thing? Well, a look at the very best non-white background color scores for readership and comprehension reveals an astounding fact. As soon as you change the color from white to any other color, you LOSE AT LEAST 30% of your readers and their comprehension. What is the highest scoring non-white background and text combo? Black text on a yellow background. The next best? A very light blue background with black text, and that may lose up to 50% of readership/comprehension. Want to lose half of your customers? Want to chop your profits in half? Okay, just slide a colored background under that product description or sales pitch you’re publishing. Or, decide to go with black text over white, and stay in business a bit longer. It’s your choice.
9. Are your pages jammed full of auto-loading animated graphics, videos, flash movies, and outrageous creativity? Do you entertain your visitors with automatically loading music or audio sound-bites? Think this is cute? Creative? Unique? Exciting? Well, your friends and family may love it. Your staff of “yes men” may tell you it’s wonderful, funny, and makes your website a great place to spend time on. Really? If you believe that, then I’ve got some terrific land to sell you in beautiful Winnemuka. But, you really know better. Keep that content off your site. At the very least, if you must put some of this stuff on a page, make the visitor click a button to get it started. Never, never, never allow a web designer to create auto-loading or running animations, videos, sound bites. flash movies and similar content for your site that slows down your page load times, blocks readership of sales pitches, and prevents or reduces profits. Remember the main rule… you have 5 seconds to accomplish 3 things. Only 5 seconds. The clock is ticking…
10. Do you have a wonderful bit of sales copy, but no way right there on the page for people to buy anything? You lose those sales. If you make the customers go to a “contact us” or perhaps an “order form” page to buy what you’re selling, you could easily lose 30% to 50% of your buyers. If your current site is doing that, you could easily DOUBLE your sales, just by placing a BUY NOW button on each and every product or service description page. The best place for the button is right at the TOP of the page, and for long pages where the reader must scroll down a screen or two, there should be another button at the BOTTOM of the page. Remember — sending the reader to yet another page to actually press a buy now button can lose 1/2 your sales. Fixing that single issue could quickly increase your sales by up to 100%. All that without spending another dollar in advertising, another dollar for hosting, or another dollar for fancy-dancy web designers. It’s a simple job. Just paste another buy button here and there and — voila! — twice as much business.
Do these ideas get your creative juices flowing? Think you might need a bit of friendly help in redesigning and rethinking your website layouts? We’re available right now. Click the BUY NOW button below and we’ll get the ball rolling. Initial consultations for these projects cost only $299. For that low price, you’ll get up to 4 hours of analysis of your online branding, content strategies, a results-oriented design overview, and a written proposal specific to your business. Afterwards, you can hire us to do the final work, or hire someone else to follow our specific design and content recommendations. It’s your choice. You will be amazed at what a bit of result-oriented web design work can do to raise your bottom line, and how fast it can happen! Call us today for fastest action — 505-796-6001. We look forward to working with you.
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