What do you want on your home page?

Jul 30 2008

A few years ago, it was easy to pick out the really cutting-edge web sites… They were the ones with massive animation, music, sound effects and a video that started running as soon as the page popped up. In fact, a “loading bar” was usually a sign to stick around because something cool was about to happen.

Now that the web is much more mature and we’re using it at a much higher level thanks to the proliferation of blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn and countless others. And in my opinion, we’re seeing “flashiness” start to get in the way of our web experience rather than enhance it in many cases. Now the cutting edge web sites are the ones that present the simplest and easiest on the outside and the most technologically advanced behind the scenes.

So how does this relate to marketing small business on the web? Flash and the obligatory “intro” movie have become passé and loading bars, once a status symbol, are now obstacles that separate your audience from the content they came to your site to find. In our experience, we’re starting to find that the sites we launch that use a lot of flash tend to have higher bounce rates than the ones that do not. The “bounce rate”, by the way, is a measure of how many visitors come to your site and leave after seeing only your home page. Our clients that start video/audio rolling as soon as the site loads have the highest bounce rates of anyone we work with. It could be coincidence, but everything else that I see happening in the marketplace tells me that this quick and unscientific study is a reflection of reality on the web today.

S o what do you want on your home page? Slow-loading animation or video that scares your audience away or a simpler web design that encourages visitors to dig deeper? Many small business owners love the idea of having a flashy web site as they see it as a status symbol, a sign that they’ve made it… But I encourage entrepreneurs not to do it at the expense of earning business and opportunities online.